On the 5th of March ngConf will once again descend upon Salt Lake City, Utah — and this year Modus Create will be in attendance! Modus Create has long been an avid supporter of the Angular community by helping our clients launch several successful Angular projects, as well as training client staff in how to code “the Angular way.” Additionally, we often present at Angular Meetups, host webcasts, and maintain a roaring technical blog. Now Modus Create is sending Dave Ackerman, Kelby Gassman, and (Jason Lunsford) with the mission to attend, report, and bring back awesome nuggets to share with our readership — and we cannot wait to get started!
Last year ngConf, organized and largely sponsored by Domo, enjoyed an attendance of over 700 developers from 12 separate countries. As organizers are fond of claiming, tickets to last year’s event were sold out in under 60 seconds. Despite this tremendous outpouring of developer enthusiasm, Domo is firm in their position that ngConf is not a “Domo event” — and based on the long list of co-sponsors Domo seems to mean it. No matter who hosts and no matter the size, gatherings such as this are vital to the health of the technology and of the community which supports it.
One fundamental measure of a community’s health is the number of speakers an event draws. Last year ngConf attracted 8 speakers; this year the number of speakers has tripled (and then some). The range of topics has also broadened. Example categories include: Angular mechanics, Angular community, and integrating Angular with other technologies. No doubt every presentation will absolutely be worth attending. Nevertheless, we feel this curated selection may be of special interest to our readers.
William Scott Moss :: @scotups
Presenting on Angular project optimization through community tools and clever programming techniques, software engineer William Scott Moss is an advocate for boosting performance through using less Angular specific code. The author of ngFX, an Angular animation library with nearly 1,000 favorites on GitHub, Moss is also an instructor for Hacker Reactor, an online school featured in CNN Money and Wired magazine (and a ngConf 2015 sponsor). Moss’s presentation will likely lean heavily on his Angular performance techniques developed for his classroom presentations. Particularly interesting is the reference to “$asqwatch” in the presentation description – what it is, and why it is important enough to mention without any qualification? Cannot wait to find out!
James Tamplin :: @JamesTamplin
Have you ever considered the limitations of the CRUD model? Not a fan of the $http service? If so, do not miss Firebase CEO and co-founder James Tamplin’s presentation, “Why Realtime Matters.” By using AngularFire to attach to a Firebase account, applications built with Angular can leverage all the advantages of the framework and enjoy the obvious benefits of Firebase’s highly performant, cloud based API solution. We anticipate Tamplin will teach us how and why the traditional $http service and CRUD model is unable to deliver real time data synchronization across multiple clients — and how Firebase provides the solution that can. Please note this year will be the second year Firebase has helped sponsor ngConf.
Dave Smith :: @djsmith42
A relative new comer into the JavaScript ecosystem, Facebook’s React.js library has been making waves for impressive speed and an innovative approach to coupling JS with HTML. In Dave Smith’s presentation entitled “Angular + React = Speed”, the audience will learn how to blend React library with Angular directives to achieve the best of both technologies. Last year Smith’s ngConf presentation delved into the plumbing of Angular’s directive technology. During ngEurope 2014 he tackled Angular’s $q promise library. Now Smith seems ideally prepared to address a topic some in the industry fear could be a technical dead end. We look forward to seeing an innovative solution that will put this fear to rest.
Ben Lesh :: @BenLesh & Martin Gontovnikas :: @mgonto
This year ngConf will feature several joint presentations, chief among them is “Reactive All The Things,” a discussion about reactive programming, a paradigm for how data flows and changes propagate through an application. Reactive programming is not a new style of development, nor is it isolated to JavaScript, but thanks to the growing popularity of React it has been enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Ben Lesh, Senior UI Engineer for Netflix, and Martin Gontovnikas, professional speaker and author of the Restangular framework, plan to tackle this hot topic in a presentation that will no doubt be standing room only — get there early!
Kent C Dodds :: @kentcdodds
Many of the most technical discussions this year focus on Angular implementation; fewer are based on the framework mechanics. In his presentation, “ngModelOptions in 5 Minutes” software engineer Kent C Dodds joins the latter group. Dodds will do a deep dive into ngModelOptions, a cool feature introduced in Angular 1.3 which enables developers to easily tweak some of ngModel’s core behavior. With over 20 registered lessons on the extremely popular (and ngConf sponsor) egghead.io, Dodds has become a thought leader in the Angular community. Come prepared to learn, ask questions, and up your Angular game.
Come Say Hello
Now are you excited for ngConf 2015? We are! Please follow our Twitter account @ModusCreate for up to the minute updates on presentations we attend, and keep a browser tab open to this blog for after action posts following each day! Are you going to ngConf? If so, what do you expect and what are you most anticipating? Let us know in the comments — and come find us if you have any questions about Modus Create or about the work we do.
See you in Utah!
