Last Friday, a few of us from the Tesla JavaScript Working Group presented on the JS Internationalization (Intl) API, namespace and standards, including our custom, in-house solutions based on all of these, and how we're using them to create a better experience for all folks who envision, build and interact with our products.
If you're curious about our meetup series, here's a high-level overview of this particular presentation and what we covered. While each meetup is slightly different, depending on the topic, we aim to offer consistency in format, delivery and all that jazz. Don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or want to learn more about our work.
The presentation was divided into two parts (a twofer!):
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Part 1: Geared towards the developer and general frontend meetup series audience, which anyone and everyone at the company is welcome to join. We covered the basics of the Intl API and standards and our custom solutions based on them.
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Part 2: Tailored towards the product, design, content and developer crowd, which dug a bit further into the details of our custom solutions and the benefits they provide to our customers, developers and partners.
Each part was about 40 minutes long and we had a Q&A session at the end of each part.
Among the reasons we presented on this topic were:
- Coordination across disciplines
- International standards + Tesla optimization
- Uniformity across all Tesla apps
- Scalability, new market launches
- Accuracy and customer experience matters
- Numbers are money (and time) - we want to get it right
Plus, we wanted to share our knowledge and experience with the community and help others learn about the Intl API and standards and vice versa.
We leveraged the following methods throughout the presentation to help our attendees connect to the topics we covered and our "why":
- Tesla use cases to illustrate the business value and problems being addressed
- Our interactive Intl demo pages that we created for anyone at the company to play around with the Intl API and our custom solutions
Each of us provided a presentation on one of the following topics that correspond to both our custom solutions and the Intl API and standards:
- Identification - Provides utilities for formatting and validation of various forms of identification throughout Tesla and globally, e.g. who are you, is a vehicle identication number (VIN) a Tesla, etc.
- Phone - A library that formats and validates international phone numbers per Tesla standards.
- Display Names: This project aims to define the geopolitical regions we know within Tesla along with all information regarding rendering them to users within those regions.
- Dates and Times - Date and Time formatting using native
Intl.DateTimeFormat()constructor with multiple native methods and sensible Tesla default configurations. - Addesses - A library that provides utils for addresses and address validation per Intl and Tesla standards.
A glimpse of the Intl NumberFormat API and standards in action that we covered:
// Using the following Intl API options for Intl.NumberFormat // with the raw input value of 123456.79 new Intl.NumberFormat('en-US', { currency: 'USD', currencyDisplay: 'code', currencySign: 'standard', style: 'currency', }).format(123456.79); // You'll get the following output: USD 123,456.79.00
Note: To support our use cases, we devised a custom solution that leverages and wraps the overarching international API and standards so that it's easy for our developer community to use and maintain.
Big shoutout to my co-presenters and JS Working Group team: they did a phenomenal job and I'm grateful for their support, dedication and contributions to both the presentation and these incredible, standards-based libraries.
By and large, the meetup was a success and we received a lot of positive feedback from our attendees. We're looking forward to continuing to share our knowledge and experience on other topics with the community and learning from them.
If you're interested in guest presenting at one of our future meetups, please reach out! Last fall, we hosted some of the Vercel crew and we'd love to have you join us as well.
Manny has gone above and beyond the call of duty more times than I can count, always delivering on impossibly tight deadlines yet always managing to keep a positive attitude despite the relentless pressure.
