Clearer Code at Scale: Static Types at Zulip and Dropbox
summary
Companies report concrete results and a clear playbook: adopt mypy and run it in CI, use runtime tools like MonkeyType or pyannotate to draft annotations, start with core libraries and work incrementally, and keep a reproducible script so the build stays clean. Dropbox reaches 2 million lines typed (Python 2 and 3) and Zulip hits 100k lines early on, migrations speed up, refactors become safer, and reading large codebases drops the time spent hunting types.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Start
- 3:18Dropbox and mypy Dropbox wanted dearer code so much, built mypy
- 3:55Mypy core team
- 4:17Understanding code
- 7:59Aside: Python 2 If you're still on 2.7: static types are for you tool
- 10:03Principles
- 10:40Work incrementally
- 11:38Define a clean build
- 15:11Get started in a week
- 20:10Robots do the boring work
- 26:13Try it out! python/mypy for at sprints!
