 Hello, everyone. I have Flores. Nice to meet you. I'm a product engineer at Intercom. I work in the automation space where we build bots and do cool automation stuff that makes human work easier. If you ever wonder how to write my name, it's a ribus up there. Most people don't get it, so I'm just going to tell. It's a flower plus a person, which is a florist, minus a T. Anyway, I have Flores. Nice to meet you. I have a problem. And my problem is I think TypeScript is great, but I find it difficult to get people in my organization to pick it up. So I'm not the only one that loves TypeScript, as you might have heard in other talks before in the past two days. Ember also loves TypeScript, and I think that's pretty damn great. So what is TypeScript in Ember rules here? So we have two columns here, one TypeScript, one Ember. So TypeScript itself is a super set of JavaScript. So all of it is pretty great. It's only a layer around a language that is mostly helpful for us as developers. It's exactly Type, which comes with a whole bunch of great benefits. It has a massive user base, so a lot of people use it. There's a lot of resources online, and it's officially supported by a lot of major companies, excuse me. And I think quite objectively you can write beautiful code. So if you see a nicely piece written in TypeScript, you're going to be like, yeah, that's nice. On the Ember site, there's great tooling. We have Glint, fantastic language server. I think Glint is pretty fantastic because it really ties in that JavaScript piece with your UI piece. And you get all these beautiful things that the whole JavaScript or TypeScript thing gets you in Glint. So that's one improved tooling in general, like I already said. You get that out of the box for free. And then there's a big piece, which is incremental adoption, which is made easy. You cannot have a JavaScript code base and everything in TypeScript, right? That would be disaster. So you have something that is easily incrementable, so you can take step by step until, hopefully, someday. You have a full TypeScript code base. And you have support out of the box. And I think we've seen a pretty great narrative already for new Ember apps that is a very compelling one. So out of the box support for all these great, fantastic tools is something that makes Ember such a powerful framework, I'd say. So what does it look like, right? It's nice to hear all these things, but what does it look like? So here we have a valid JavaScript Ember components. It's a simple user list. It uses the stores, the users. They can add to you, set them in the constructor, and then you can add users later on. Now this is a valid TypeScript Ember objects. Great. TypeScript is JavaScript. We're done, right? Same thing. No, checks. We can do better. So let's do better. This is our TypeScript components. And I've taken the liberty to add some sprinkles of magic there. So I've added types here. So you can see the signature. So we type the components. We type our store. We have some arguments that now have proper types. And something I want to point out for all the nasers or you need to type everything, you don't have to, right? TypeScript's inference is actually very powerful. So implied in proper and good methods or good means, you can actually see it here as well. TypeScript, in first, from how you use the users here, how you set them in the constructor can actually tell that it's going to be an array of type user, which I think is very powerful and it takes a lot of the burden of typing everything specifically out of your own hands. So why? Well, let me insert some cool stuff. So we have type inference. We have a very fantastic skill. It catches bugs before they learn in production. Better tooling and development. We have self-documenting code. Reducing necessity for class tests and so much more, right? We can write entire, I don't know, documentation pieces. We can hold talks about it. I would love to do one, but this is not it. But there's so much more to it. So now that we're all aligned, right? Everybody loves TypeScript, and that's great. So we all think TypeScript is great, but find it difficult to get people and organizations to pick it up. Well, I'm great. I'm glad we're all aligned here. So how are we going to solve this problem? JetGPT, of course. So I asked JetGPT, can you give me a plan clearly broken down in steps on how to become an influencer? And, of course, it delivered. So we got some nice steps. That's great. You can read it. But, yeah. All right. So I think I can do something with this. And with that, I like to say, welcome to my talk, be the best TypeScript influencer you deserve to be. So what exactly is an influencer? Let's start at the start. And how better to give a couple of visual examples. So you might be familiar with these people. They're influencers. With this guy, he's an influencer. With him, I think we can call him an influencer by now. We have a great influencer. And this lady is an influencer. So I guess you can kind of get the gist here. So what we're going to be going for today is something like this. Can you see the little TypeScripts? Yeah. That's us. That's going to be us. So we're going to do things the influencer way. In general, influencers have existed throughout time. Right? That is a timeless principle. And what we want to do is we want to essentially influence people within our organizations to pick up TypeScripts. So we got this framework in nine easy steps. So step one is to find your niche. We're going to research your target audience, build your personal brand, create high quality content, choose the right platforms, be consistent, engage with your audience, collaborate, analyze, and adapt as they update in the pool. So let's get started, shall we? Is that one? To find your niche? How is that in TypeScript for a niche? Pretty easy, right? Great. So one done. Two. Research your target audience. And this, I personally find the squishiest human part, right? So let's take these following two people. We have Terry here. Terry loves TypeScript, likes to promote TypeScript. It's insanely muscular and smells great. Did he allow it to matter? Did I say they do? And then we have Sabrina. She's skeptical of TypeScripts. A brilliant engineer, people look up to her and she loves cats. With these two people, the approaches you need to take to reach out to them, they vastly differ, right? So the people have the influence, but intended. How do you approach your outreach? So how do we go about this? You can run a survey or two. So learn how people like to work and learn and find what their motives are, especially when it comes to learning or not learning TypeScripts. Try to uncover some generalizable personality traits. So I personally like the Myers Brick type indicator. It's kind of these more generalizable pieces that you can then tailor your outreach to. Get cozy with them. Get to know these people. And definitely rely on other people for help. So maybe ask some other people throughout your organization, like leaders, that then can tap into their teams and come back to you. They're like, oh, these are the people you're going to work with here. So on the surveys and individual preferences, at Intercom, we run regular developer experience surveys that get a lot of good touch points for us to work with and understand who we are actually working with here. And on top of that, most teams at Intercom have a special space in Coda where they write their collaboration, communication, and learning preferences. So if this is something that your organization already does, then it's definitely a really good piece to tap into. And if not, it might be a good idea to introduce it because it requires or lifts your effort of talking to all these people. You can just kind of look around and then pick information from there. Nice. Step three, build your personal brand. This is hard. This requires consistency and it requires effort. And I'm mostly saying that for myself because I'm not particularly good at this. So note to self, but also for people out here. And I think the bottom line is people who are not you need to know who you are. It's really easy for us to just go about our days, and we experience ourselves all the time for better and worse. But it's also good to realize that you need to put some stuff that is you out there. So how do you do that? By writing something, just anything, be a thought leader, collaborate with people and be helpful and lavish in praise. So on write something or anything, it's a great tool for personal expression. It puts your name out there and it shows that you're an expert in the field and people know who to find when it comes to TypeScript. And when I say anything, it's really anything is a little message up there. It's just something that's a little tidbit and you can just do these kind of things. It doesn't have to be great pieces, right? Be a thought leader, it's more of the business terms kind of cringes me, but it has a place here. And it really comes down to share things you find interesting, share your findings, share opinions sometimes for users, just show that you put thought in there and nurture a healthy discussion around this that also allows other people to put thought in there as well and just kind of internalize that and then move it forward. Collaborate. It's a big piece. It doesn't skill that well because one-on-one stuff, there's not one against many here, but it has a great knock on effect. You can have someone that you've helped and then they were convinced that, wow, that's actually pretty great. Then they start doing it themselves and spreading the gospel there. And it's a great way for people to also see that you're not this robot up top that says, go use TypeScript, right? Like you want people to know who you are and that you have a personality and that you're a pretty cool person. So it makes you more human and approachable and just more of like a side note here. Keep an eye on channels, right? If people ask questions, just engage with them there and like a lot of collaborations happen there. Give you some ASMR here. Next up, be helpful and love and praise. I personally like this one the most. So be the first one if you see something you like, give people praise. Put them on a proverbial or actual pedestal. It's a great motivational factor for people. It shows that the work they do is appreciated and has impact. And generally just good vibes. It's nice. You're a good person and people like you. That's what you want, right? It's free. Beyond that, do learning sessions. Be helpful in that sense. Help a lot of people out answering the questions or going through things they struggle with. And when you do that, just be very patient and constructive. Otherwise, you deter people from your cause and that's not what we want here. We want to influence people. Except for create high quality content. There is a billion definitions by a billion different people. Maybe not a billion, but anyway. What is high quality content? I wrote with something that's a bit more subjective, but for me content is of high quality when it underpins your goal. And the rest kind of follows, right? So it should be things that are functional, informative, actionable. It raises awareness, right? Like we want to have typecript in the forefront of people's minds. And on the flip side there, it doesn't require hours or days of work. And it shouldn't have to be immaculately written. And if it is, and if it comes naturally to you, that's a big plus, but it's one of the many talents I don't possess. So shame. So everything is very conceptual, right? It's like, oh, yeah, great. But what does it actually look like? Flores, come on, tell us. So here we go. So we're going to look at some things that we do at Intercom that we found very effective and useful. So one thing is we wrote an internal knowledge base. This is written by a bunch of brilliant engineers. I'm not part of them. And it covers their whys. It covers best practices, approaches to testing structure, and it has links to curates and learning resources. And I think this is a crucial and fantastic tool for people to understand our reasoning as to why we do our things and we give them the resources to actually then also start applying it themselves. We wrote a comprehensive FAQ. So it's part of your influence. You're talking to a lot of people. You hear a lot of questions and you'll start to realize that a lot of the questions are not that unique. There's a subset of permutations to each kind of problem that you're trying to solve. And a lot of journeys of people look very different. So if you put these things in an FAQ and just refer to that, it's great for scaling your influence there. And then what nice with this as well is that people who go here and they come in with a question, they find an answer to that question, but they also will find answers to questions they didn't know they had. We also do great learning sessions and presentations. The one on the screen show there is by Peter who did a talk earlier, which is great. And this one in particular covered our Ember code structure, Ember as we call it, but also things like typescripts and how that fits into the ecosystem there. And then another important and nice one is short form post updates and channels like Slack. You can see the Queen Friday afternoon typescripts. It's something like a little tip bit of information that people can read on their Friday when they just don't want to do any work, but they walk away from it with new information and knowledge, which is quite nice and is actionable. So these things are really, really useful. We also have a very nice Lin boss that not just engineers. This one is like, hey, you're trying to do something we don't want you to do, so maybe consider not doing it. You can ignore it. People do, which is boo. But this is a nice way to kind of in a non-invasive manner just try to change some behavioral patterns that we don't necessarily like to see. And this applies for typescript, but also general issues that we want to avoid. But then on the flip side, this is all, that's why it's not like the dark side. It's the bright spot bot. So if you did something nice, it's like, great, you did something great, which is praise, right? And it doesn't mean that much, but it's a nice little sticker of approval or like a big thumbs up. You did something nice. So this one is very helpful. It's hard to quantify, but people have come forward and they're like, oh, I actually really appreciated a robot telling me I do my job great. So these are great, right? And these have worked for intercom, but they might not work for you. So try and find things and maybe this inspired you, maybe didn't, but then at least you know what not to do. Or use what works for your organization and think about these kind of pieces of content. And more on the cautionary side, maybe a labor block post type content might not be what you want because it's really hard to get people to engage with like long walls of text or like long videos. But if you like to do it, you should definitely do it, right? But it's something to keep in mind. And on top of that, make sure where people can find this information, right? If you can have the best documentation, best FAQ, but if nobody knows where to find it, why would you even bother? Another one is avoid spam and desensitization, so you don't want to do too much because I can have an adverse effect of your influence or you don't want people to go, oh, this guy is the type of guy, huh? You want to have like, yeah, type of guy, good vibes. And then last but not least, content is not final nor immutable, so revise content, right? Like here you're a person that learns things over time, things change. So revise when all these, when your knowledge expands, when practices change, when new versions come in, when you receive feedback, use all these things as tools to feed into your content and acknowledge these things because it also makes you more relatable. But above all, create content you like to create. Optimize for your personal interest, it keeps you going at it. And I think that's a very important thing, right? We're not, we're not doing the sprints. We're, we're trying to build something up over time. Like, Rome was a building a day, nor have you influenced TypeScript in a day. Step five, choose the right platforms. There's, there's many, many different platforms out there. There's only so many business users. Just be sensible, but do pick what you want, right? Pick a platform that you'd like to use personally. Like if you don't like using email, don't use email. If you like using Discord, then yeah, please use Discord. And it just is, is a method for you to just keep on being an influencer, right? Like you don't forget about it because you loathe using that platform. And there's a trade-off, right? Like some platforms are less used and then you don't have as much reach. But then like cross-post some stuff. Like people move around. Step six, good, good effort. Be consistent and engage with your audience. So this is the first thing that came to my mind when I read this step. And to me, the only, the last two are very important, the first or optional, do what you want. Just influence or repeat. So on, on consistency, be consistent with what you do. But don't bring yourself out. Please, thank you. I don't want to have someone come to me and say, oh, of course, I saw you talk, but I brought myself out. Are you happy now? Yeah, I'm not happy. No, I want you to keep at it, right? So find something, find a balance, right? Find something that works for you. If you don't want to post something every week, then do something every other week, right? Like it's, it's something for the long run and optimize for that. So you don't have to push yourself to do things you don't want to do. Until they get out of your cave, scary, who? But influencing is a two-way street, right? You can just not push your stuff out there and expect people to just pick it up. I was like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. We're going to do it now. It's something you need to engage with people. You need to reach out. You need to talk to people and you need to, yeah, like have it a two-way, two-way stream. So checking with people that have shown interest in your cause, share exercise to engage in the audience, that for some people work very well, so you can entice them to prove you wrong and then they prove you right because TypeScript is fantastic. And then until then, it deserves way more reiteration than I'm going to do, but give people praise, right? Like make sure that people feel seen, appreciated, and have impactful work. And it is, right? So why not just point it out? It's free. It doesn't cost you any effort, except for a couple of words. Step seven, collaborate with others obligatory pop culture references. Dangerous to go alone. Take this. So it's all great, right? Like we're in a big organization where one influencer doesn't get the results you want probably. So how do you scale your impact, right? Well, by creating a TypeScript hero network, of course, obviously. So what this does is a case starts a culture, right? So what you do with this, you try to find people across your organization, all these different like hotspots and touchpoints and it's people of whatever tenure, whatever skill set is just if they're curious and they care about this, that's people you want to have on board. And then in turn, they will become an extension of your influence, right? They will hero TypeScript for you in all these sections of your organization. And what is nice about this, if this is executed well, it is, sees as to be just your influence. It is a culture. So if you suddenly sees to be your network here and that culture will be pushing forward. So it's a self-sustaining piece. And it spans horizontally, right? Like I said, all these different touchpoints. So remember this guy? Yeah, he's great. We want to have him. I'm just going to leave that slide for a bit more in tomorrow. I appreciate it. Be close to the ground. So it's kind of a cave thing as well. So it's scheduled one-on-ones. And I personally had a one-on-one recently with one of my teammates. And he wrote this. You don't have to read the whole thing. You can just assume it's good. But he's using TypeScript by default now. I influence. Great, it worked. And something to point out as well below that is that he propagated or he had that ball rolling and he had someone else start using TypeScript, which is what we wanted. So another tool that works well, I find, is engaging code reviews. This is also where you can exert some influence, some opinions, and these people learn from it. And then they pay on the favor in different teams. And this is also something that you can leverage your hero network to do. Now you can do learning sessions, which is fine if that's like the style of teaching you like to do. Have people come in with topics and you do it over a lunch time. Workshops is also a good one. So get people hands-on. Think about some exercises or give them a challenge to work through. Maybe in like a hackathon weekend lunch, however you wanna fill that in. And then a nice one is also more of like a working group kind of thing. So you can just schedule every other week or every week, like an hour where people can come in and just ask you questions or share things. And maybe some people in your hero network have something to say to the people they wanna influence. So everybody can kind of come in as a very open environment for people to join and help in whenever they like. Step eight, we're almost there. We're almost there. Analyze and adapt. So this is one of the things where it's good to be very clear in what you want to do and what you want to achieve. So set goals for yourself. Define timelines, lose timelines for these goals, right? Be ambitious here. But also don't blame yourself for not reaching them. So be ambitious is that you do it again consistently for a long amount of time. And then check in with yourself. See what works, see what doesn't work. It's rates, experiments, right? It's, you have all these guinea pigs that you can work with or like hamsters. And I think that's a pretty great way for you to also learn more about yourself and also learn what you can do here. Define metrics for your success. This is important for yourself but also important for stakeholders, right? So find some stuff that you can show people that like is actually working. It's probably more important to show stakeholders in yourself here. So quantifiable things. And I'm thinking things like number of typescript files created in contrast to JavaScript files. You can maybe look at some quantifiable things where you say like, okay, these typescript files are of high quality, et cetera. Excuse me. And then you can have also like number of questions asked and answered in like a channel or something. That is a good measure for engagement. And you can also learn a lot of stuff to then like take action on. Gather feedback. This is a continuous process, right? We always should gather feedback and should improve, right? Because we don't know everything. And if you do, that's great. So ask people personally for feedback. Levery Shure typescript hero network to provide you feedback. So either they give you direct feedback or they also collect feedback from their hotspots and their respective communities. Developer surveys are a good way to kind of see where you are at. And on like this continuous process, just like keep it together and work that into just how you are as an influencer. And it's just crucial to understanding how your career as an influencer is progressing. Step nine, last one. Okay, we're almost done. Stay updated and evolve. Follow relevant technologies is a really good one. Stay updated. Just follow things like the official typescript dev blog or just like adjacent technologies that are not necessarily relevant directly, but you can just follow how people think and talk within these communities and take these learnings back. And communicate this back into your organization, right? As part of your influence. And you can feed this into the content that you create. And you might find it interesting, but there's also other people might find this interesting. I wouldn't have found it otherwise. And then find other influencers. Internally and externally influencers. There's not just influencers, people that you can learn from. So observe what others do really well. Internalize it, give your own spin. And these are things where you don't need to reinvent the wheel, right? There's a lot of examples of people who have done influencing pretty greats. Just take these things and then apply it as well. And step 10, I like, there are four, step 10 steps. I am an autonomous human being. Shadjipati doesn't tell me what to do. Enjoy the process. Enjoy the process. The most important one of all, right? It's all fun and games until you lose joy in what you do. And then it becomes a dragon and you're like, oh, what did I ever want to become an influencer? I just want to go back to my cave. So yeah, these last nine steps are an unusual thinking framework for exerting influence within an organization setting. And I think with that, I hope an entire thought, whether you agree or not. So yeah, if you enjoyed this, my name is Forz. If you didn't enjoy it, my name is Joe. And with that, I'd like to say thank you and welcome to your new influencer life.