We've all been there: you’re multiple folders deep in a project, and you must reach up to grab a component in a top-level folder with an unknown level of ../'s to traverse.

These complications increase drastically as a project grows in size and complexity; they might even cause fear whenever the word "refactor" is uttered. Fear not! There is a solution to your woes—path aliases.

As a JavaScript developer, I’m sure you’ve encountered the frustrating runtime TypeError Cannot read properties of undefined.  TypeScript gives you two ways of interpreting null and undefined types, also known as Type Check Modes, and one of them can avoid this easily overlooked TypeError.