Intro

Hello, world 👋

This is a new blog written by engineers, for engineers. On it, we will be publishing technical content from Bloomberg folk who work on our thriving JavaScript environment. This also includes web/web-adjacent technologies, and it very much includes TypeScript. After all, TypeScript is JavaScript plus types.

Why now? A better question is perhaps: why not sooner? For more than 20 years, JavaScript has powered the Bloomberg Terminal, which is used by more than 350,000 financial professionals around the world. During this time, thousands of Bloomberg engineers have shipped more than 10,000 apps, accumulating more than 100 million lines of server-side and client-side JavaScript code. We have a strong interest in maintaining open web technology (as well as the adjacent runtimes and tooling) as a robust, long-lived technology basis for our business. Correspondingly, for over a decade, we've participated seriously in the broader web community through technical contributions to its foundations, financial support, and deep engagement in standards groups like TC39.

Much of this participation has long been visible through a variety of sources (but only if you know where to look). It includes:

• Our firm’s public GitHub repo and open source projects we’ve published for the JS community (like Stricli and ts-blank-space);
• Proposals for new JavaScript features (like Array.prototype.toSorted and Promise.withResolvers);
• Various TypeScript language features seen in TypeScript 3.8, 4.3, and 5.5;
• Contributions to JavaScript tooling (including pasta-sourcemaps) and Node.js;
• New web performance metrics (like Container Timing);
• Conference talks (such as at JSConf and Perf.now) and social media;
• Hosting meetups, collaboration summits, standardization meetings; and
• Occasional long-form guest blog posts.

A lot of this has been done in collaboration with partners such as Igalia, as well as institutions such as Ecma International, OpenJS, Unicode, and the W3C.

But we've never had a central place to bring it together to share what we've done or what we're up to next. This new blog will hopefully solve that problem!

Stay tuned for some exciting posts in the next few days! 😉

Rob Palmer

Rob Palmer leads JavaScript Infrastructure & Terminal Experience at Bloomberg, where he has spent a decade building and leading the teams behind Bloomberg's core JavaScript environment. Outside of Bloomberg, he serves as co-chair of TC39, the committee that standardizes ECMAScript, and works to advance and sustain open source efforts that benefit both enterprise users and the broader web community.

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