A VS Code language server for Esri's YAML specification

Thu, 01 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

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 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 .

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A VS Code language server for Esri's YAML specification