Misc code improvements

[hlovdal]

• Bugfix (non-breaking change which fixes an issue)
• New feature (non-breaking change which adds functionality)

Proposed changes

Remove unused code, whitespace fixes for the files I edited and added .ackrc file since by default
ack ignores node_modules which is not applicable for this repository.

Checklist

• I have read the contribution guidelines
• For non-bugfix PRs, I have discussed this change on the forum/slack team.
• I have run npm run test to verify the unit tests pass
• I have added suitable unit tests to cover the new/changed functionality

[dceejay]

Most look good/trivial to me so ok. Will need @knolleary to comment on updateMissingTypes in case he has plans for that.

Not sure we need the .ackrc file - you can add it to a directory above where you clone the repo to (eg a Projects dir and it would then apply automatically to any paths underneath. So not sure we need it in this project specifically. (But if we did then we could add --sort-files to make it more consistent)

[knolleary]

No issue with most of these changes, however not sure we want to add .ackrc to the project. We tend to only include config files for the things actively used by the project and don't want to set an expectation we'll include config files for any and all tools out there.