A VS Code language server for Esri's YAML specification
Over the summer of 2019, I interned as a software developer at Esri in Edinburgh, building a Visual Studio Code language server extension for Esri’s in-house YAML specification.
Code editors get their clever functionality – validation, auto-completion, go-to-definition, find-all-references – from a language server plugin running behind the scenes. Esri’s configuration files used a custom YAML specification with no such support, so writing them meant working without any supporting functionality.
I adapted Red Hat’s open-source yaml-language-server to the custom specification, and contributed the improvements that weren’t Esri-specific back upstream.
The project involved C, C++, TypeScript, and Node.js, with modules in different languages binding together to produce the finished extension. It was also my first substantial use of JSON Schema, which came back round several years later on the TUSAIL experimental measurements database.
Hi 👋😊! I’m Vidminas (most people call me Vid), a postdoc on the CHAILD project splitting time between the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford and the Institute of Education, University College London.
I am interested in technology and education, and more specifically researching and developing technologies that empower people. The current CHAILD project focus is about defining and designing for agency in children and young people’s use of AI tools.
I completed my PhD at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation at the University of Edinburgh in March 2026, supervised by Professor Fiona McNeill and Professor Judy Robertson. The project was about better understanding and designing tools to help teachers search for educational resources.
I am always keen to chat about teaching and learning, human-computer interaction, participatory research, and designing applications for good, feel free to get in touch!