NG-Conf 2018 Summary
For those of you who haven’t been fortunate enough to go to NG-Conf, I highly recommend you try to make it happen. If you’re interested in Angular you should be here. If you use Angular at work you should definitely be here. I wanted to give a summary of my experience at my first NG-Conf.
TL;DR:
- NG-Conf is amazing.
- The speakers are really approachable.
- Angular 6 is going to be awesome.
- Stackblitz is super cool.
- NgRx is everything right now. (Also checkout NgXs)
- All your web apps should be PWAs.
First things first, the conference is located in Salt Lake City, Utah. This city seems like a good fit because it is easy to navigate and transportation is abundant. The weather can be a little dicey in April but because most of the events took place in the Grand America Hotel, it wasn’t really an issue. You can get more of the details about the conference itself here.
Now, onto the highlights of my time here.
To say that NgRx was the main topic of discussion this year is quite an understatement. This conference could’ve easily been called NgRx-Conf. There were also some good sessions about RxJS and some general Angular concepts as well. Not to mention my personal favorite session on progressive web apps (PWA).
I was also lucky enough to take 2 days of workshops before the main conference. I took the NgRx workshop, and the Unit Testing Angular. Both of these were great and the teachers were very knowledgeable. Some of the content went over my head but I believe that’s okay for just getting your feet wet with the concepts. I highly recommend you sign up for workshops if you attend next year.
One of the most surprising things about this conference is how approachable and accessible the speakers are. I have been to a few other conferences before but I have never been able to sit down and have a cup of coffee with the creators. Luckily for me, this conference was different.
On my first day here I met one of the organizers named Bonnie Brennan. She was kind enough to introduce herself and introduce me to Aaron Frost aka “Frosty” who is one of the founders of NG-Conf. It was really amazing to sit down and pick his brain about a range of different topics. He’s a cool dude. As if that wasn’t cool enough, this scenario just kept happening the whole time I was here. Everyday I was meeting another “celebrity” of the development world. I met Google developers on the Angular team, Apple employees, and the creators of so many of the tools that I use and love.
The amount of talent found here is astonishing. The people at this conference are some of the best the industry has to offer. It was a humbling and amazing experience, and I would recommend it to any developer.
