Reasons why ng-conf 2019 will be the best conference of the year!

My journey with Angular wouldn’t be remotely the same without having been to ng-conf. I am sure there are a number of people out there with an idea, or concept, that they would like to turn into a web application. You may be aware of the role that Javascript plays in today’s web-based applications. One of the biggest challenges in this current development world is choosing the right tech stack to build the platform on top of. You have a lot of options — Angular, React, Vue… The list seems to go on and on. Frankly, having a list of options is not a bad thing. Not only does it help give you choices to match the right tool for the job, it just further illustrates how powerful and important this type of web application development is to application users and the engineers that create with them.

Now with respect to the list of options, Angular has become my go to choice. It was not always that way though. That is largely due to what ng-conf has provided to me over the years — more on that in a bit. For most of my career, I have been a traditional, full stack developer, working with Java/Spring to build web applications. Sure, I have dabbled with PHP, native mobile platforms, various MV* Javascript frameworks, but generally speaking stayed in my traditional full stack development J2EE world. I was starting to take on side projects that made me really question this approach for a lot of reasons. For most things that I worked on at that time outside of the 9 to 5, it just felt overly complicated and bloated. In terms of the hosting/deployment processes of the day, to run a J2EE application container, it was also not nearly as cheap on my budget or time commitments. As my projects became more and more front-end driven, something new just needed to be explored.

It was around this time that I shifted my role professionally with a team that maintained a fairly large scale AngularJS application. Not having explored AngularJS for a few years at this point, I was both excited and scared. There were days that seemed like I would make a huge leap in learning how to work with the framework, followed by days that would make me feel completely owned by it. I always felt that I was doing something wrong, yet, at the same time things would work out in the end for the part anyway. I have always been the type of developer that preferred un-boxed, limitless frameworks that were not very opinionated. However, with AngularJS, I found myself wanting a bit more of that. I was starting to see that the trade off in complexity, and standardization had merits that I had not considered previously.

After working with AngularJS full-time for a year or so, my company provided me with the opportunity to attend ng-conf. Sure, I had been to a number of great conferences over the years. They are always some mix of community, fun, and learning. Depending on which conference you attend, the levers are going to be adjusted differently. I am not sure how they manage to pull it off, but honestly, ng-conf in my experience has the best adjustments around each of these.

Community

If you ever shop for attending a conference, you will likely notice that a good number of the speakers are “making the circuit” and are quite friendly with each other. With ng-conf being more solely focused on Angular, as opposed to the entire web application development ecosystem, the community just feels smaller and more intimate. You will quickly, and easily, see folks that you have read articles they have created, attended a training session or viewed a video tutorial they authored, used one of their npm packages, or tracked through a feature request or issue along side them in GitHub. If you have been doing any bit of Angular this is inevitable. I have to admit to being a bit star-struck in this regard, and ng-conf provides no shortage of this experience. There simply is no comparison to being able to walk up to a library author, or an Angular contributor with a question. There are other Angular conferences around, and there is definitely no shortage of Angular talks mixed in at other conferences as well. I distinctly remember walking around the hotel and seeing folks like Sean Larkin and Pascal Precht just having casual fire-side chats with folks. Awesome. These are not one-off occurrences. The conference just provides an easy platform for talking to people through the social activities and the format of the event itself.

Furthermore, this is the one event that has been deemed as “the” conference for the team at Google to attend. Not only are they attending, but they are speaking. Additionally, for the last few years they have even done a Q/A with the general audience at the end of the conference that has typically answered a lot of questions around the future of the platform as well as justifications around concepts or ideas incorporated into Angular.

One more thing to mention is that the conference provides a phone app that attendees/speakers can use to communicate with each other. As obvious as this sounds, I do not recall another conference that has provided this. It is also used extensively, which further makes you feel part of a tight-knit community. There were a lot of nuggets of good FYI material that I would be alerted to via the app as well.

I generally head home from Salt Lake City, all the way across the country to Atlanta, feeling like I am part of something cool and I cannot wait to go back again. I leave completely amped to working in this ecosystems.

Learning

When I first attended ng-conf, I honestly did not have very high expectations. For one, I was still actively using AngularJS, with no plan at that point to migrate. I was a bit frustrated with stories of the migration process, and what it would mean to my small team of 3 back home. Why would the Angular team have gone through such a huge shift with the framework. Everything I had ever used prior to this had never done something like that, and if they would have, it would have been the end of the framework. Yet, somehow, Angular has lived on, if not grown.

The format of ng-conf is primarily a single track of talks, that everyone attends from start to end. There is a self driven day during the event, but for the most part it is single tracked. I wasn’t sure how this would work for me, given that at the time my exposure to Angular 2 (they were about to launch 4) would connect. What happened next was pretty magical. I started seeing and understanding, why the dramatic shift from AngularJS to Angular had to happen. Talk by talk, it was more and more clear how I could benefit from getting my application upgraded. As the conference proceeded, I started seeing the road of an actual migration path, and thinking about how I would better design the system I had inherited in the new Angular world. I was so excited to work with everything being discussed and take it for a spin, I spent my super late nights working through the “tour of heros” tutorial instead of sleeping. I spent my off hours during the day asking questions and getting guidance from key folks in the community around what I was learning about in the tutorial. For once, learning angular felt a bit more approachable than it once did in the AngularJS/PhoneCat days. While they had talks about AngularJS and Angular, most of it was definitely about Angular. However, somehow, they were done in a way with the right level of detail to where I could quickly shift my experiences to understand what I was learning about and see how it could apply to my application eventually.

As if the conference talks were not enough, you optionally can add on workshops, or essentially day long training in a classroom setting, for a very reasonable price. Not to mention that they are led by Angular vets, that you most definitely have heard about, read about, or interacted with during your Angular days (including some Angular team members).

I find that when I get back to the office, I am super excited about the new stuff I have just learned about, knowing that it is not so far off or hard to implement as you typically experience after leaving a conference.

Fun

I would be remiss if I did not mention how much fun the conference is! Not only are there more prizes and giveaways than any other conference I have attended, they are awesome prizes at that. As a disclaimer, I should mention that I did manage to snag a sweet drone last year, and I seriously never win anything. Not saying you are guaranteed to have your name called, but it sure is fun to possibly have that happen.

During my trips to the conference, they have hosted a casino night, a few musical concert events, escape rooms, arcades, a treasure trove of board games, food truck park, happy hour events, etc. Not to mention that sponsors usually host various happy hour type of events with games/prizes. These things are fun on the surface, but take a whole new level of appreciation once you realize how much learning and community aspects are intertwined. Reminds of when someone explained to me what webpack with great detail was while playing craps.

While I have not yet been able to attend, the conference seems to typically end with one last community/fun activity such as a service project, hiking, or a baseball game. I cannot think of any other conferences that do this.

It is also worth noting that Salt Lake City is a neat city, and the venue for the conference is in a beautiful top-class hotel.

Are you convinced?

• If you are thinking about building an app, this conference will get you the information to properly plan the design of your system to scale over time.
• If you are thinking about attending a conference that will keep you aligned on the Angular path, this conference will do just that, with your chance to hear directly from the Angular team on what lies ahead.
• If you are you an Angular developer that would like to be part of the community in a more profound way, this conference will provide you the chance to get a direct line into that scene.

I would be curious to hear why you love ng-conf, and perhaps what I missed, as I am sure that I did. Otherwise, I will see you in Salt Lake City!

EnterpriseNG is coming November 4th & 5th, 2021.

Come hear top community speakers, experts, leaders, and the Angular team present for 2 stacked days on everything you need to make the most of Angular in your enterprise applications.
Topics will be focused on the following four areas:
• Monorepos
• Micro frontends
• Performance & Scalability
• Maintainability & Quality
Learn more here >> https://enterprise.ng-conf.org/