Top all-time · #6848
Colin McDonnell
Personal blog · colinhacks.com/essaysprogrammingweb
Colin McDonnell's personal blog at colinhacks.com covers programming and web. Since 2021, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 16 times, most often “Live types in a TypeScript monorepo”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Colin McDonnell's essays on TypeScript type safety, such as an explanation of how tRPC shares function signatures through import type. Linked in the tRPC discussion as background.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Creator of Zod, author of the initial tRPC, building Pullfrog. TypeScript, open source, and developer tools.
Most-linked posts?
- Live types in a TypeScript monorepo4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-05-31
- The dream of end-to-end typesafety2 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-06-01
- Designing the perfect TypeScript schema validation library2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-06
- Zod Codecs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-08-24
- An email regex for reasonable people2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-03-07
What Hacker News says?
You kinda can share function signatures with TypeScript's import type. And that's what tRPC does but adds some generics in the middle to make things seamless. Explanation here: https://colinhacks.com/essays/painless-typesafety
Comment linking /essays/painless-typesafety
on “TRPC: End-to-end typesafe APIs made easy”Submitted Designing the perfect TypeScript schema validation library as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI wrote the initial proof of concept for tRPC a little over a year ago (though I'm no longer involved in the project). Seems like there's some confusion about how this works. A more complete description is available here[0] below but I'll put a brief explanation below as well. - It's designed specifically for a full-stack TypeScript app. Your API is implemented as strongly typed server-side functions. - The input ty…
Comment linking /essays/painless-typesafety
on “TRPC: End-to-end typesafe APIs made easy”Submitted Zod Codecs as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Live types in a TypeScript monorepo as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted From README to documentation site in 10 minutes as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted An email regex for reasonable people as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Introducing Zod Codecs as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted An email regex for reasonable people as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted API typesafety without the tears (or code generation) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The dream of end-to-end typesafety as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Live Types in a TypeScript Monorepo as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Live Types in a TypeScript Monorepo as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Live Types in a TypeScript Monorepo as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Designing the perfect TypeScript schema validation library as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Building a strongly typed API without GraphQL as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
