The following are some of my notes from the course Practical Advanced TypeScript

types and interfaces work the same in many respects but not always.

A type can be a union of two other types/interfaces.

type Pet = Dog | Cat

But an interface is a contract that an object must implement. It can't be "one or the other"

Also: if I mention an interface of the same name twice they are merged. Similar to in Ruby when I open up a module twice

interface Dog {
  name: string
}

interface Dog {
  color: string
}

const dog: Dog = {
  name: 'buttons',
  color: 'black'
}

but types don't allow this. You can only declare a type once in a given name space. This is a good thing! It means that if we want to leave an interface open for adding new properties, we can do so and if we want to disallow such behavior we can use type.

If I was a library author, I would strongly consider using interface if I want to let consumers extend my library without having to import the type and using the extends key word. But if I'm writing types in my own code and want to avoid collisions, I should use type to have the complier catch them for me.