ng-conf 2017, My First Angular Conference

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NinjaCodeGen

7 min readApr 16, 2017

Hey fellow coders!

ng-conf 2017 was quite an experience! It was great to see so many other people passionate about Angular, and such emphasis on the community. There were so many memorable things, and so I wanted to jot down my list.

Highlight — Rob Wormald mentioned the Angular team may be interested to talk to me about NinjaCodeGen in a couple of months. And to think, this almost did not happen! This occurred after the final session on the last day, the ng-panel event. I had already started walking out to go home, but I decided to come back for some pictures of/with the Angular team. I was very honored they took a look at NCG and was also surprised Rob knew the street “Telge” I was on in Houston, TX.

Sessions — Topics I enjoyed the most were about optimizations, firebase, fixing memory leaks, e2e/testing, and the material design workshop.
UPDATE: All videos here!

Sponsors — the ones that I remember the most are Domo, Progress, ngGrid, ngPrime, Clarity, Nrwl, and of course us at NinjaCodeGen.

Friendliest/Funnest Sponsor Group — to me was Progress… Jen Looper, Sebastian Witalec, TJ Vantoll, Tara Manicsic, etc.

was happy to snap this for them and post on the ng-conf app!

Pluralsight — Was great to meet them after 4 years of using their awesome online software training.

Domo — Jon was a recruiter there, I expressed interest in learning more and see if Creative Engineering could use and possibly sell it in SEA.

Nrwl — I had spoken to Jeff Cross before on the phone, but it was the first time to meet him and Victor Savkin. Often didn’t see them at their booth since they were busy with sessions. Spoke to Jeff about my glow-sticks at the sponsor party :P.

Firebase — I thought their firebase hot sauce was cool… and tried it yesterday and it tastes like tobasco. Looking forward to generating firebase code with NCG!

Syncfusion — We evaluated this recently before the conference and didn’t know about it before. They seem to be increasing marketing.

ngPrime — seen before and agree they have a cool logo. Like the other component libraries, looking forward to generating code for them.

Clarity/vmware — I was surprised vmware has this group making open source software. Looks promising, can’t want to see what we generate with it!

ag-Grid— Sean, first sponsor I talked to. Looking forward to evaluating and using their grid more. Quite advanced!

ionic — had a nice chat with them about ionic being the 3rd template-set we had for NCG.

Infragistics — Had a strong showing with their popular component library.

Speakers — I think John Papa stood out the most in my mind. I have been watching so many of his Angular videos on Pluralsight.

John Papa — Was a great treat to chat with him twice. He told me to call things beta, not buggy :). Great advice! :P

Dan Wahlin — Didn’t know he was so tall. He was shooting basketballs, and I saw him again with John and Ward in the hall. John joked about how Dan likes to feel tall next to him.

Ward Bell — Ward sure had colorful clothing, and it was nice to share with him that I was currently working at Fox, where his colleagues used to work at. They still use BreezeJS and other things from back then.

Deborah Kurata — was happy to take a picture and recommended the ng-conf backdrop. Great idea!

Joe Eames— We discovered Joe has a daughter that dances and helps out at the conference also. He seemed very happy to take a picture :).

Igor Minar — I only snuck in a quick selfie at the end with Igor.

Ben Lesh — Ben complimented how cool the NCG logo on the sticker was ;) I attended his RxJS session with Tracy Lee | ladyleet earlier. They were busy recording singing with Frosty to upload to twitter when I ran into them during lunch.

Aaron Frost — I danced with lights with Frosty and his twin during the Daft Punk tribute.

Sean T. Larkin great talk on WebPack and found out he’s living where I was born, Lincoln NE. Cool!

Kara Erickson — impressive quick coder, but I was wondering if she uses ctrl-shift to highlight whole words.

Swag — My favorite swag were pens with lights (Chariot Solutions), the Progress red Kendo UI shirt (felt and looked nice), the hoodie (was awesome), and ionic pen (beautiful shade).

Patches — Angular and Kendo UI patches are the ones I liked the most.

Controversial/Confused — Giving bootstrap the boot, I didn’t understand, and one session had a picture of a former president, and I just thought that was a bit too political for a tech conference. The comedy skit was good, but went over-time and forced the next speaker to present really fast.

Angular Material — I bumped into Kristiyan Kostadinov, who works on the Material Design team, at the airport on the way out of SLC.

Most Active on ng-conf app — I did not meet all of them, but did some. I have no idea why I was stuck at 18 pts, or so it showed on the app.

Food — Chocolate covered bacon has to be the food that stood out the most.

Nightlife — Checked out Purgatory, Epic Beer, Elevate, and Skye (Skye was closed though).

Restaurants — Oh Mai Sandwich, Chilli Thai, and Laan Na Thai. Tried drunken noodles at both Thai places with sweet and sour sauce, like back in the day at the Commons when I worked at Microsoft. Also ate pho noodles and banh mi sandwich at oh mai sandwich.