How Michał Miszczyszyn Turned 350 Pages of TypeScript Into a Book

The question kept coming back. No matter how many times Michał Miszczyszyn answered it in the Facebook and Discord groups he'd built for Polish developers, the same TypeScript question would resurface a week later from someone new. Then again the week after that.

His first thought was a blog post. His second thought — a year and 350 pages later — was a printed book.

In this story, Miszczyszyn, a Tech Lead at X-Team, explains why he wrote a TypeScript book for the Polish developer community, how he structured 350 pages to serve everyone from juniors to seniors and why the hardest part of self-publishing had nothing to do with writing.

A Community's Question, Answered at Scale

Miszczyszyn had been an active blogger, conference speaker and group organizer long before the book existed. His Polish-language blog had drawn a large community around it, and that community was the origin of the project.

"In the past, I've created a few developer-oriented groups on Facebook and Discord," he says. "In those groups, I noticed people asking the same TypeScript questions over and over again. I tried answering them, but the questions just kept coming back. That's what inspired me to answer those questions in one big document."

The decision to write in Polish was deliberate on multiple fronts. Polish developers knew him. The logistics of selling a printed book — VAT MOSS taxes, domestic shipping — were manageable within Poland in a way that worldwide distribution, particularly during the pandemic, was not. And the language itself presented its own small engineering challenge: Miszczyszyn consulted the Polish Language Counseling PWN to make sure terms like "JavaScript" and "TypeScript" were grammatically integrated correctly without sounding forced.

The audience he had in mind was broad by design. The book opens with ECMAScript fundamentals that are not TypeScript features per se, then moves through a tutorial covering basic types, functions and classes. The first nine chapters give junior developers the foundation they need. Chapters 10 through 21 shift to more advanced ground — types compatibility, covariancy, contravariancy, nominal typing, conditional types in practice — drawing directly from Miszczyszyn's commercial experience with TypeScript. "That's what makes the book so useful," he says. "It's my hands-on experience with TypeScript."

Built Like a Software Project

Miszczyszyn is a developer, and the book's production pipeline reflects that.

Every chapter lives in Markdown files tracked on GitHub. When he commits and pushes changes, a GitHub Actions workflow pulls them and builds three ebook formats — PDF, EPUB and MOBI — storing each as a GitHub release. The automation let him track every revision and share the latest version with early readers without any manual packaging.

The creative process was less systematic. He wrote when he was in the right mood. The book was a hobby project, something he worked on outside his X-Team hours, driven by what he thought was important, what his community had asked about and what had actually tripped him up in production. "In my opinion, that's what makes the book so useful," he says — not a textbook written from theory, but a record of real problems and the ways he solved them.

What he did not anticipate was the non-writing labor. Setting up an ecommerce shop to sell the book turned out to be the steepest climb of the entire project. Three products — PDF, EPUB and a printed edition — required hours of configuration and testing to get rounding, taxes and discounts to work correctly across different purchase scenarios. "Nightmare!" he says of the process, without much additional elaboration needed.

What Comes After 350 Pages

Miszczyszyn is candid about his appetite for another book: it's unlikely, though not impossible. What he's already planning is a YouTube debut — a new channel he describes as his next big project.

The book, meanwhile, remains available in Polish at typescriptnapowaznie.pl, with an English ebook planned for a future release. For a developer who built a following by answering questions one at a time, the book is the same answer at a different scale: one thorough document, written once, for everyone who's going to ask.

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