Eventually this should be part of a separate mypy ci build, but right
now it's just a general guideline. Future commits and PRs should be
validated for static typing wherever possible.
For reference, the testing commands used for this commit were:
mypy --ignore-missing-imports --pretty --disallow-untyped-calls app/
mypy --ignore-missing-imports --pretty --disallow-untyped-calls test/
The app/utils/*_utils weren't named very well, and all have been updated
to have more accurate names.
Function and class documention for the utils have been updated as well,
as part of the effort to improve overall documentation for the project.