Angular Connect 2018 and What We Learned About Angular Ivy

And that’s a wrap! 2 days of talks, panels, workshops and above all lots of conversations with Angular developers from all over Europe and the 🌎 have come to a close.

It’s been my second year at the conference as part of my role on the Frontend team of Panaseer and it has only gotten better. I am not going to attempt to sum up the conference in 500 words as it wouldn’t even come close to doing the experience justice — for that you’ll have to go yourself next year. Instead, I want to mention some of my personal standouts, especially with regards to Ivy, Angular’s shiny new compiler that the whole community, including this conference, is abuzz about.

At a conference that featured a wide variety of events and topics across two talk stages, one workshop track and Q&A time with the speakers, there was a lot of content to cover and even though I had support from my colleague Florian I am sure I missed out on some great content. In the end, I picked a personal track focused on RxJS, Application & Component Architectures and lots of Angular Ivy.

Highlights for the first two topics were talks by Michael Hladky, Bo Vandersteene and Manfred Steyer, who all did a great job of bringing across some key concepts that are shaping the discussion of reactive programming and Angular at scale in the community:

1. RxJS schedulers which were previously something I had only been aware of peripherally are a powerful tool to influence the timing of how workloads get scheduled for when you require more subtle control than what’s offered out of the box — Michael Hladkey with RxJS schedulers in depth
2. NestJS makes a compelling case for aligning backend code with the structures and syntax we are used to in Angular frontend applications, extending the possibilities of shared code that is universally understood and used across platforms — Bo Vandersteene with Nest the backend for your Angular application
3. Today’s architectural decisions for larger scale frontend’s like choosing between a Monorepo and Microfrontends largely come down to a series of questions about the amount of shared state, legacy code and need for different technologies — Mafred Steyer with Architectures for huge Angular based enterprise applications

💡Go and make sure you check out their talks once uploaded on Youtube

Now… drumroll… 🥁 Angular Ivy ⭐️ Multiple members of the Angular Core team gave introductions to not just the underlying implementation goals, but the shiny future it unlocks for the Angular ecosystem.

It didn’t come as a surprise that all of those talks had packed rooms and many of the questions during the final event of the conference — the Angular Core team panel — were focusing on different aspects of Ivy. If you didn’t get a chance to attend the conference, I want to leave you with an idea of why everyone is so excited about it:

• You’ve probably heard about the fact that Ivy makes your Angular application more tree-shakable. I realised that I didn’t understand the scope of that statement until I learned during Alex Rickabaugh’s Day 2 keynote, that almost the entire framework including core functionality like Dependency Injection are now tree-shakable. You might be wondering, why you should care about that, but just ask yourself what the chances are of you needing the whole Angular core in a small Angular Element… With Ivy you won’t have to worry about that anymore 👏
• If I am honest, I never invested much time into looking at lazy loading with Angular routes. I definitely saw the value and benefit it would bring to our users, but just didn’t have the time to go through the details of how lazy loaded modules behave and interact. I don’t think that’ll be a problem anymore after seeing how neat the syntax for lazy loading with Ivy and ES6 dynamic imports is. Take a look for yourself!

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• Finally, whilst it sounded like most of the Ivy work at the moment focuses on achieving feature parity with the existing compiler, we were left with some glimpses of what it might bring in future. If you like hearing about the possibilities of higher order components, faster build tooling and the potential for next generation runtime profiling, you’ll be in for a treat over the coming years!

I came away from the conference feeling excited about the technological advancements that are coming to the Angular ecosystem and itching to try out some of the new features. Equally, I was inspired by the warm and open community that gathered in London for the last two days featuring many new connections, tech discussions, but also honest conversations about diversity in tech and what each of us can do to ensure the Angular community is inclusive and welcoming to everyone.

If you didn’t get a chance to go this year sign up next year! It’s an experience worth taking part in.

Also keep your 👀 peeled for part 2 of this blog from my colleague Florian who took a different track at the conference and will share his experience the coming week.