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Miguel @ Angular Connect 2019

This year, Lisbon Nearshore offered me to travel to London to attend the biggest Angular conference in the world. As a web developer, more specifically focused on developing in the Angular framework, this was an opportunity I did not want to miss.

October 2019

This year, Lisbon Nearshore offered me to travel to London to attend the biggest Angular conference in the world.

As a web developer, more specifically focused on developing in the Angular framework, this was an opportunity I did not want to miss. To be able to participate in such an event and share the same space with other developers and some of the most well-known speakers on the planet is the career dream of anyone taking their education seriously.

Angular Connect took place on the 19th and 20th of September. It is one of those events in which you have the chance of meeting not only like-minded peers but also the companies that are revolutionizing the industry and talk face-to-face with the main influencers in the space.

The conference is divided between 2 stages with a vast array of topics discussed. It also boasts workshop spaces and an expert zone for Q&As. There is a great variety of talks happening at the same time which made it hard to choose which place to attend.

I made my homework and knew from the start that I would not be able to see everything that interested me, therefore I chose the events that would make sense regarding the context of my work and the challenges I face in order to be able to add value to my projects.

Fortunately, all the talks are recorded and available online so that you can always go and check the ones you had to miss at the conference.

My main interest was in the Ivy presentations in which I could take some notes on Ivy and on how to improve my projects performance-wise: make them faster, more efficient and according to best coding practices. 

1st day – How we make Angular fast

This was the talk I was more curious about. “Papa” Miško Hevery is considered one of the fathers of AngularJS. Nowadays, he is the Tech Lead Manager of the Angular team.

Ivy promises to be way faster than the current Angular engine. In this talk, Misko shows us a few ways to get metrics related with the execution time and used memory. Difficulties the team faced while developing the new compiler are also addressed.

You can watch Miško’s talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ8oJ1rpwIc

The secrets behind Angular’s lighting speed

In the first day, I would like to highlight the talk of Max Koretskyi. Max is a software engineer working for agGrid and the founder of the in depth Angular blog (https://indepth.dev). He is addicted to drawing patters, studying them and explaining in an easy to understand way. At Angular Connect he brought us a talk in which he explained how Angular can speed up development.

Talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQ8oJ1rpwIc

Concluding: despite the fact that in the first day there was no concrete topic on code optimization in the apps developed using Angular,I still got a lot of value from the stories Angular developers shared on the challenges they faced while developing the framework and how it really works.

In truth, you can only develop on a framework if you understand the fundamentals of how it operates, am I right?

Keynote – Day 2

In the second day, Minko Gechev (https://blog.mgechev.com) opened the keynote. In it, the following topics were addressed:

  • Web platform & standards
  • Automate DX
  • Enable best practices
  • Enable extensibility
  • Build at scale

I would like to highlight the Automate DX topic, in which Minko taughts us on how to create lazy routes using the Angular CLI.

For all of those who are starting to develop in Angular, or even the ones who wish to improve their development skills, Minko referenced the Web Dev (https://web.dev/angular) which has all the guidelines for developing apps using the framework.

You can watch the keynote here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y3A_RCHoqg

Access to the keynote slides here: https://speakerdeck.com/mgechev/angularconnect-2nd-day-keynote

Performance optimizations in Angular

Out of the most interesting talks I would like to highlight the one from Mert Değirmenci. For those of you who’ve never heard of him, Mert is a software engineer at Google who spent about 4 years optimizing Angular when it was migrated from AngularJS to Angular2+ on the front end of Google Cloud.

His talk was mainly about warning developers for some performance issues and how to avoid them.

Talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlmx1PbP8Qw

Slides here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17ZBJej07Y1oXt7MNFeL-Wi37HCWk4JZf/view

Conclusion

The talks are the main asset of Angular Connect, however, there are several other options for those who do not wish to sit for hours listening to speakers. For example, at the expert zone you could chat with them for a couple of hours in a refreshingly open environment. Since my focus was on gathering as much knowledge as possible so to improve my own projects, I took advantage of the expert zone dedicated to Performance to speak with Mert DeÄźirmenci, Max Koretskyi  and “Papa” Miško Hevery. Not only was incredibly valuable to speak with them, it was also a great opportunity to hear the questions the rest of the community presented. For me, this was the main highlight of the whole conference.

At Angular Connect I had the opportunity of communicating with other developers, get acquainted with new products, understand how the industry is evolving and, above all, get tons of value to apply to my work! It was a fantastic experience which I look forward to repeat.