A Freshman at NgConf 2023
In most of my work and experience builiding applications from my home office, days can morph into weeks of solo-work with the occasional pair programming sessions and routine standup meetings. To that end, I can admit that I was anxious and very much naive to the craft of attending a developer conference which seemed to me to lie at the center of networking with other developers, learning what's new in the Angular space and meeting speakers and sponsors.
The Angular Framework is advancing and keeping up by walking the fine line of adopting new features and bringing the community along in the process. For developers new to the framework, Angular is trying to be more approachable by adding new features such as standalone components that make it easier to bootstrap an Angular application. More experienced developers are also more excited by the push to embrace features that improve parts of the framework such as hydration, reactivity and performance. Suffice to say, the conference showcased the bleeding-edge of what the Angular team and community are doing to push the framework and the web in general forward. The turnout fielded developers from small and large teams as well as those who had just began working in Angular to those who have been there from the Angular.js days.
So what did I take out of the conference?
I learned something new about the framework - how to use auxilliary routes in Angular and how to type the ngTemplateOutletContext directive.
Speaking during breakfast and lunch with developers working in different contexts with Angular, there was this general feeling of excitement about how the framework continually enabled them to build better applications for their users while improving the developer experience(DX) with each release as the framework is embracing tooling from the community such by:
- integrating tools such as Vite and esbuild that speed up local development and the build process
- embracing more modern testing tools by integrating jest support and migrating away from Karma to Web Test Runner as well as having support for community tooling in Cypress
- improving the hydration process for server side rendered applications
Can Angular be exciting? I don't know if that's even the right question to ask. As more applications are getting older with time, can Angular provide a platform where developers can not only maintain those older applcations but improve them with each new version of Angular? More so, can Angular be the framework of choice for developers building new applications? These seem to be deeper questions that the community is tackling. The work to improve the framework is continuing with improvements on reactivity, performance and hydration just to name a few areas where work is already in progress.
I left the conference a lot more hopeful and excited to get back to work with my team through the various problems that software development teams face each day. As much as a lot of grunt work is needed, software delivery teams are people who work in specific group and individual contexts. The more important lessons from the conference were how to contribute more effectively to the success of my team as we build the various products to meet business needs with the knowledge that the tools out there are meant to help us along the way.