ng-conf Advanced Workshop Review

Yesterday I attended the advanced workshop at ng-conf. I thought I'd share some of the highlights.

There were four rooms for the advanced workshops. We stayed in the same room while the instructors rotated.

AngularJS Animation

Our first session was on AngularJS Animation by Lukas Ruebbelke. I'll be honest, I've been spoiled by being able to work with great designers the past 5 years or so, so I haven't kept up on design & CSS. So that said, I've relied on them to do all the amazing UX animations & such.

So this was all new to me and it was great to see the magic behind CSS transitions and how to make them work with angular. We did have some issues with wifi so it took a little longer to get started that we had hoped.

Lukas had some great demos setup up for us to play around with. I had the most fun with this example adding a jack-in-the-box transition effect to the images.

Advanced Directives

Our second session was on advanced directives by Joe Maddalone. This was my favorite session due to the topic, the content, and the hands on examples.

I know I don't use directives enough in AngularJS. It was great to see some of the advanced features in directives.

It was interesting to see how to build a directive to loop through data as an alternative to ng-repeat. I especially enjoyed learning about transclude: 'element'. I admit it was a little hard to grasp, so I may have to go over it again and play around with it more.

Lunch

Lunch was provided and catered by the Little America Hotel. It was amazing as their food always is. I just wanted to give a shout out, that's all.

Angular Formly

Our third session was on Angular Formly by Kent C. Dodds.

I have to admit, I really hate writing forms. In fact, over 10 years ago I wrote sort of mini language to create forms. I would parse it with Perl to generate html for forms.

One feature I really love in Django is their forms implementation.

I haven't really had to work with forms for several months, so I haven't felt that pain, but I would say that if I were to create any type of form with more than 3 or 4 fields, or if I had an app with multiple forms, I would most likely use Formly.

Firmly basically lets you code out your forms in JavaScript. I limits the amount of coding you have to do and gives you consistent looking forms with many great features to do everything you need to get done.

Protractor

Our last session was on Protractor by Ben Clickinbeard.

Protractor is basically an end to end testing framework for Angular apps.

I apologize to Ben, but I kind of checked out of this session and went back to learning about animation and css transitions.

It had nothing to do with the presenter, but rather the topic. I spend 7 years in QA and I find testing a boring subject overall. I know some companies are all about test driven development, but I'm not a fan so this whole topic just had me disinterested.

Summary

Overall it was a great day to step out of the home office and spend the day learning new things - and I did learn a lot of new things. Good job Egghead.io team for the presentations.