ng-conf 2017: Brief Overview

Last week, I had the pleasure of going to ng-conf, so here is a "short" overview of what to expect going to these conferences and the highlights of what happened in this one.  There will probably be more post on specific talks.

Big Picture

Key Concepts

The main themes of the talks were converting AngularJS to Angular (where AngularJS is Angular 1 and Angular is 2+), form validation with Reactive and Redux, performance by limiting bundle size, and other offerings with Angular.

Upgrading to Angular

The overall talks were about the best way to convert.  The idea was to use ngUpgrade to make AngularJS code accessible to Angular code.  Then systematically convert AngularJS to Angular code.  Ideally you would create components for each independent route so that you either have all Angular code or all AngularJS code.

Form Validations

Angular uses observables, so there are a variety of different ways to upgrade form validations to observables.  This makes it easier to modify the form validators and reusable for different form fields. 

Performance

The main benefit for upgrading to Angular 4 is that they claim there is a 60% reduction in bundle size.  In fact, there were multiple ways to decrease the overall bundle size of your application.  There was a pretty big push for lazy loading all routes if possible.  Service workers allows for preloading and content caching.  If you can, serve an application shell, so user's see an initial page load.

Format

This three day conference was particularly jam packed with content from 9AM - 6PM .  The second day you were given the freedom to choose between 3 or 4 options on every block.  The speakers were given 5 minutes, 20 minutes, 1 hour, or 2 hour blocks.  5 minute blocks were usually left for sponsor introductions and one-off short talks.  These usually weren't Angular specific. 

Most of the talks are of the 20 minute variety.  Usually, these are topics that require at least an hour to talk well about, but they are jam packed in 20 minutes.  This means that they like to use snippets, comments, or even checkout different git branches.

Preparation

It is a bad approach to go here to have them teach you the technology.  It is hard enough to follow along, and the speakers will constantly remind you of what little time they have to explain it. You will get the most out of the conference with knowing 70-80% already and looking for 1 or 2 big takeaways from every talk.  

Choose talks that do not have significant overlap with other talks.  Spend a little time researching the core concepts.