02:24 - Jules Kremer Introduction

04:21 - Jules and the Angular Team

05:41 - “The Dev Rel Role” (Developer Relations)

08:28 - The Enterprise

10:22 - The Angular Developer Relations Team

12:18 - How the Team Should/Will Work

16:05 - The F5 Experience vs The CLI World/Project

20:46 - Implementing Simple vs Advanced Concepts

27:24 - Angular and Language Paths/Choices

31:02 - ASP.NET Core

35:10 - Jule’s Role in Developer Relations

43:21 - The GDE Program

Picks

New York Pluralsight Study Group (John)
issues | angular/angular.io (Ward)
GO CUBES (Lukas)
Auto imports from TypeScript (Lukas)
FEM 2016 Plunks (Lukas)
Sushi Burrito (Joe)
Angular Swag Feedback: juliekremer@google.com (Jules)

Special Guest: Jules Kremer.

 

There are five of us so it's a hang five.

Hello everybody and welcome to episode 87 of the Adventures in Angular Podcast. Today on our panel we have the amazing John Papa.

Hey, everyone.

The Illustrious Ward Bell.

Hello, illustrious listeners.

And the even more illustrious Lukas Reubbelke.

Aw, Joe. You're sweet.

And his fantastic beard.

Hello. [Laughter]

As our special guest today, we have Jules. Oh my gosh, Jules, I don't even know what your last name is.

Oh my gosh, that's horrific. We can just go last-name-less.

You're just Jules, yeah.

I'm just Jules.

Yeah.

I only need one name.

You do. You're like Madonna.

But just in case our listeners are curious, my last name is Kremer, which you would have said wrong anyway.

I totally would have.

So, Jules Kremer.

Jules Kremer. Awesome.

Hello, everyone.

Do you mind giving us an introduction background to you?

Oh, sure. So, I'm Jules and I've been at Google for about five and a half years now. I spent the first five years at Google actually in our Google Enterprise teams doing a variety of things mostly related to Google Apps and associated products like Gmail and Google Docs, et cetera, et cetera.

And then I joined the Angular team at the end of last year to focus on our developer advocacy, in particular with enterprise. But we'll get there a little bit later I believe. Before I joined Google I spent… I don't really want to age myself even though this is a listening event, but I spent a really long time as a developer in the enterprise ecosystem mostly working with… well, I started out way back in the day with VBA and then I helped VBA move from VBA to VSTO and I worked with the VSTO team as an external architect helping with tooling and also doing things like working on the OPENXML file formats. And then I sort of…

This is Microsoft, right Jules? Microsoft? Because most…

Yes, yes sir. Microsoft.

People won't know what VSTO is.

Oh, VSTO. Visual Studio Tools for Office. So, back in the day when Office was not considered a developer tool and we had to fight our way into the Visual Studio team. So, I was part of that fight and it actually went really well. Although VSTO never really picked up as a popular language. And then I moved into the .NET world and I spent many years either managing or actually as a developer in the .NET space for large companies and doing line of business apps.

So, you've actually spent some time with companies who were trying to put applications together.

I've built a few over all those long years that I don't want to name. [Chuckles]

So, what attracted you to the Angular team?

You know it's interesting because last year I was actually at ng-conf although none of you guys know it. And actually, the Angular team did not know it. In fact, the only people who knew it were Microsoft. And I actually went to ng-conf because after five years of doing this enterprise thing at Google I really missed developers. And so, a friend of mine found out that Igor had some tickets that he could give to Googlers. I applied for it. Igor did not remember that this occurred until a couple of weeks ago. And I went totally stealth. I did not identify myself as Google.

And the reality is I sat in the audience completely lost because I didn't even know what Angular meant, really. And the only session I understood was when Dan Wahlin and Andrew Connell got up and talked about TypeScript. And I said, “Oh wow, this feels familiar and right.” And so, I started learning about Angular and I thought, “Well, this is really cool.” I didn't understand any of it, really. And then by complete fluke I actually met Brad and Naomi for something else related to Google. And the more I learned about the team and how they view the world, how they view web development, and what their actual goals for Angular are, the more I fell in love with the product.

And I'm just really blessed that I got to take on the job of Enterprise Dev Rel for this great product.

So, you're saying the Angular team is the best team at Google.

I am saying the Angular team is the best team at Google.

Nowadays.

So, what attracted you to that? What attracted you to the Dev Rel role and what is a Dev Rel role there?

That's a great question. So, I don't necessarily want to be an engineer any longer. I did that for a number of years. I'm not really interested in spending all of my days behind code. What I really love is actually working with enterprises to solve big problems. I'm sure enterprise is not the sole group that I could have an effect with. It's just where my history is and so where my passion lies.

I think when I talk about Dev Rel I really mean, how do we reach the enterprise? How do we understand their common concerns, where they need to go, how the world of frontend development or web development is changing? These line of business apps that I and I'm sure you guys, or at least Ward and John because you're old enough like me, have written back in the day on the server side and how we move this into this frontend world. So, I think that's what drew me to it, is getting the opportunity to work back with developers in the business world who are solving different problems than the average startup or a consumer-based development shop is.

It's kind of an interesting recognition that Angular has in bringing you on about how important that audience is. And you must have had some discussions about the trajectory of Angular and how you were going to fit into it. And I don't know what you feel comfortable sharing, but we'd love to hear it.

I would say that what kind of actually happened in a nutshell was I was very interested in how developers in the enterprise were working. And I fortunately work for an amazing company that understands some people decide to change their careers. And Google gave me the opportunity to… I kind of went to my boss at the time and said, “I really need to get back to developers. It’s what I want to do” and my job wasn't really related to that at all. And Google fortunately was observant of that and said, “Why don't you go find what you think will get you back to where you want to be?” And so, I kind of was putting feet on the street. I had a little presentation called 'Developers at Work' and I was talking to various teams around Google about people who had a vested stake in developers in the enterprise.

And by fluke I met Brad and Naomi in that. And I gave them my presentation and I said, “Oh, I want to talk to Dev Rel about building this team to do this.” And they said, “Why don't you start the team here?” And so, that's what I did. And I felt like looking at… Brad actually put a deck in front of me that showed the amount of Angular uptake in the enter-… or overall rather, and then where he thought I fit into the enterprise. And I basically went to my boss and I said, “If anybody had put this chart in front of me as a revenue paid product, I would have jumped at it.” I think it's awesome that it's open source. And so, all of those community contributions and how we can extend the framework to actually fit different needs is pretty cool. It was like the cherry on top of a cool cupcake for me. But that's really how it came about, was Brad recognizing that a huge part of the Angular community is the enterprise and that enterprise have slightly different needs and slightly different communication channels than the rest of the JavaScript community, if that makes sense.

This is just such a fascinating topic because we've spoken a bunch on the show before about what we call black matter developers. We've mentioned that several times. And that's this idea that there are a lot of people out there that are doing things. And they may not be listening to this podcast. They may not even know who Igor is. But they're using Angular. [Chuckles]

They're building [inaudible] tools, right? And they want to get their job done and they don't care that everybody's pissed off about JavaScript tool fatigue for the last six months. That's not their number one concern. Their number one concern is getting code done. So, this is like an incredibly interesting topic, at least for me. All these people out there that are coding and worrying about their code and not worrying about whether or not TJ Holowaychuk is happy with what somebody else is doing with whatever open source project.

Yeah. So, I want to be really clear about one thing that you just brought up, which is my job is not only enterprise. I think that I came here to do this or Angular with the assumption that enterprise was the biggest customer. And the revelation within the first few weeks was that's not necessarily true. There's a whole other community of JavaScript developers who love and contribute to Angular. And so, we are building a small developer advocacy team and making sure that we can represent both sides of that story. I think that enterprise at least in my experience and what I've seen so far with Angular, they do have different concerns because it's about getting code out the door and solutions that work for their users, whether that is the consumer users for example an airline or internal line of business applications that only airline employees are going to use.

So, I think there are both sides of the coin in the enterprise and that creates a little bit of a different communication model for them. And so, I think it's the harder nut to crack. The people who are watching or listening to this are probably not those people. They don't get the time in the day to just sit and do these types of fun things. And so, my real challenge is how do I reach those people? How do I get them in front of things like this and how do I collect what they really need to be successful with Angular? And I'm still struggling with that.

So, help me understand why. Why do you think this role exists for Angular? Because you mentioned, the key point I think, that we glossed over and that's Angular isn't a profit-making product. So, why add… this is… we're all overhead, right? So, why add overhead to do something that to me sounds like a great idea?

My honest answer to that is I think the Angular team wants to make the world of web development better for every developer. And if that means that 50% of this audience or 40% of the audience is really large companies with a lot of enterprise developers then our goal is to make it better for them. And you can't do that without finding out what their challenges are and what they need to be successful. And so, that's my primary role. The first three months I was here, all I did was contact big customers and say, “Are you using Angular?” And one of the things I was so surprised about having come from Google Enterprise is how fast the doors flew open to me just by saying I work on the Angular team. So, clearly the need was there. And I have a very, very big job to figure out how to embrace that community and bring them into the culture that has come about from Angular success in the JavaScript world.

And you mentioned a team earlier, Developer Relations team. Does that exist yet? I know it's still early in your role, but what do you envision for that team?

Yeah. And I'm not sure. So, the team is going to be very small. As most of your listeners probably know, we just hired Rob Wormald. So, he's the first developer advocate for the team. So, it'll be a very small team. It clearly just formed. So, we still need to figure out what our game plan is and what the rest of the year means to us and how to best succeed in getting the next million developers over to Angular.

Actually, Brad told me I had to shoot for 10 million and I'm not allowed to say one million anymore.

Oh.

Wow, go for it.

You're going to have to suck developers out of COBOL to get that.

Yeah. [Laughter]

You know that would probably be fairly easy at this point. [Laughter]

I don't know. Just before we signed our retirement. So, what kinds of activities do you anticipate your team doing? How are you going to go about your day? Again, it's all early but you must have some kind of ideas about how this would work.

Mmhmm.

And I say that because I'll bet our listeners would like to know how to meet you halfway.

Absolutely. So, I didn't realize that I was going to build a team until a couple of weeks ago. So, part of this is all new in my brain and I'm digesting what we can do and what [inaudible] possible is, right? And my gut instinct is at least in the enterprise space we have one critical thing we need to do first and that's figure out what the challenges are and figure out how we help people who are already using Angular 1, get to Angular 2, and doing what I call mini design sessions. So, my hope is that we can visit a bunch of enterprise customers. We can take an evaluation of where they are right now and then help with the vision of how you get from point A to point B.

In the JavaScript community or the non-enterprise startup community is the way I term it, I think we have less need to do that. We have a lot of that feedback from our existing community already and more need to just evangelize what Angular 2 will bring to their development process. And I think they already have better guest or estimate on how much it will take or them to get from ng-1 to ng2. So, it's more about the evangelism of ng-2 specifically. How we do some of those things is still… I'm not really sure. One of the things I want to do for example is take my little team on a road show. And when we do that it's not just, “Let me meet five enterprise customers.” It's, “Let me meet five enterprise customers. Let me go where the community is. Is there a meetup? Is there an event I can create to create some traction, get in front of everyone?” instead of just picking and choosing a few big companies to work with.

Should people who have users groups and things like that be sending you something saying, “Hey, if you're in town we'd love to see you,” or something like that?

That's a great question. I'm fearful that if I said that on air… [Laughter]

[Inaudible] got to be a full public place to put it.

I have to be honest. One of the things I'm most shocked about is the amount of, the number of requests we get for Angular to come talk at something. I'm running all of our conferences this yeah. I hope it's better established where we will be speaking because we have an events page on Angular.io and that's from weeks and weeks of work of trying to figure out where do we need to be, to be in front of the mutual audiences that we need to talk to? Yes, if you have a user group let me know. I tend to rely on meetup right now for that. And I am actually building a little app to help us manage this called Houston right now, because it's supposed to be mission control. But we're using that for multiple things. At the end of the day I'm hopeful to have a place where somebody who manages a community can come and actually notify us that that community is there and list it so that other people can find it.

I take it that your app is an Angular 2 app and that part of this… as you were describing your trajectory it goes from all these Microsoft technologies to working in these outreach roles for Google for the last five years and now you're back close to developers and you're discovering Angular 2 for the first time. So, you have some fresh eyes.

I do. And I think I didn't realize until recently how valuable that is to the Angular team. I truly just had a huge full-born case of impostor syndrome where I've been purposely [inaudible] myself because I didn't understand maybe the ecosystem of Angular. Every time I look at Angular I go, “This is really cool and this makes total sense,” but I actually spend more time trying to figure out the build system and those types of tools because I just didn't know any of them. I'm used to Visual Studio and an F5 key. And that world is gone. And so, I'm embracing this new world and really learning it. I thought it was just my own challenges but what I've come to realize in the last few weeks is the Angular team really needed to hear that pain, because my pain is going to be the pain of a bunch of other .NET developers who are moving over into this world. And that's one of the most valuable things I bring to the team, is that experience and the inexperience and the challenges with that inexperience.

You pointed out the F5 experience, right, in Visual Studio.

Which to those who may not know what that means, that's basically in Visual Studio they got a button that we press. It's a magical button that we all love. You press it and it does everything you need. And so, in Angular 1 world that would be I build my code, I minify it, I compress it, I compile the Sass to CSS, I put it over another folder, I stick in cache-busting, and it just serves it up to a site for me automatically.

And the browser pops up and there it is. [Laughs]

Yeah. And then music plays and flowers bloom.

Yeah.

[Inaudible] around. Yeah.

It's like a Disney movie. It's fantastic. But then you come to this CLI world, this command line interface world and now you do it all manually. And if you've been doing that with a button for all these years, the common thing I hear a lot is for people who command line interface like I do is people say, “Oh, well just go learn it.” If you've been pressing a button for 10 years because Microsoft and IntelliJ tools made it easy, it's hard to go back to now figuring out, what are all the things that button was doing? So, how's that been for you? Not just for you but the people you talk to.

Honestly it's probably been the most challenging aspect of this, in part because I think that the ecosystem world is huge. The first app I tried to write I basically got lost. Like do I need Gulp, Grunt, Broccoli, Coffee? Yes, I always need lots of coffee. But what are the right tools that all fit together and integrate and actually will serve me in the best way? And if you google this, you get a horrific slew and pages and pages of result and none of them really say, “Here's a good opinionated way to do it.” And I think that was my biggest struggle. And I probably came into the office every Monday for the last few months saying, “I just don't know what to use. Someone tell me.” And the team honestly wouldn't tell me. They made me fight it for myself. And I'm super glad that they did. But having an opinion I think is super important.

And having some proof points that show tools working together I think is also super important. I don't have those answers yet but I'm hopeful that the work that Igor and the team is doing on the CLI will help point a good solid direction for new developers.

So, that's interesting to me though. As I understand it, I'm not on this project in any way but I've been keeping an eye out, the CLI project that the Angular team's been working on, as I understand it under Igor's tutelage they're trying to figure out how to solve the problem of making that build system easier to deal with for Angular 2. Not a button like in Visual Studio. It could lead to that maybe, but what are the steps to put all this stuff together and are they trying to make those choices of how you build and all that so we don't have to worry about, is it Grunt, Gulp, Broccoli, Garble, who knows what?

Yeah. I think Igor's master plan is definitely to get to that point. And the way I view it in my head is that it gets to the point where if Visual Studio wanted to make it work with F5 it would. Clearly that's probably not ever going to happen just because of the wealth of options we have when it comes to build and deploy for web applications. But I think that's the master vision. I think right now we're still working on what do we think is the right structure for your code repositories to make tooling easier? And I think we're experimenting pretty heavily. And Igor has chosen to use my little learning app as the ground zero for that learning. So, it's exciting for me because it's the first thing within Angular that I've been able to be a part of since square one. And I'm not coming in after six months of not having any idea what they're saying. So, I think it's a great project.

I'll be honest, sometimes I'm like, “Really, why is this so hard? It just seems like the world would have evolved further in the last five years that I haven't touched code to now.” But it takes Igor actually stepping aside with me and explaining why there's different problems in the JavaScript world and in the web world than probably what I experienced in my past when I was building desktop applications.

Yeah, we've talked a bit about that, what a gap that is for people to leap who are used to building server-side applications, if there were building or doing web development there, who are used to building desktop apps in one of those technologies like WinForms or WPF or something like that.

This is a leap in every respect.

It is. But one of the things I'm most excited about with this leap is that we're not jumping alone. And after being within Google Enterprise for five years one of the best things about coming to the Angular team rather is the work we do with Microsoft. And so, having seen Microsoft really embrace Angular and embrace the choices than an Angular or a JavaScript developer has to make, I think has been… was really inspiring for me, especially having been an ex-softy. TypeScript is an awesome language that I think is really bridging the gap as well and helping with tooling in Visual Studio Code and all that kind of stuff. So, I don't think we're leaping alone which makes this all really cool.

So speaking of gaps, this is just a conversation that you and I have had Jules a few times, is on one hand Angular 2 is introducing a lot of really kind of advanced concepts such as observables and RxJS and these reactive data flows and push change detection, all these really awesome things. But at the same time there are the jQuery type developers who just, they come in and they're like, “How do I even bootstrap this thing?” And so, somebody who is equally interested in producing content for the community is… where do you see that need and how do you cover that spectrum of people like [Taro] and Gleb who want to want to geek out with computer science degrees and PhD's to the other 98% of people who just want to figure out how to get a button on a page and they just need really simple things? How do you prioritize that and [craft] that story around this is how you take your first step in Angular 2 and not break a bone?

So Lukas, first of all I want to tell you that it's interesting you just lumped yourself in with the 98% because the last time we had this discussion and I was commenting on this discussion with someone else, they said, “Remember that you're in a room with one of the top 1%.” So, don't necessarily think you're in the 98%. But I just want to toot your horn there for a minute.

Oh, thank you.

[Chuckles] So, when it comes to content it's definitely something I'm interested in. one of the challenges right now is we have a lot of content that comes out of the community. Some of the more experts that have been around for a while tend to write content not necessarily geared towards the newbie to Angular like myself. It's been hard to find that kind of content. We do have a content plan internally to try to write a progression of blog posts that explain more of the ABC's. So, you saw recently Viktor published the template one. So, we have Kara is about to publish a blog post on getting started with Angular 2. And so, really trying to intervene both with advanced topics, with basic topics, to get our developers on their way. I think we're going to rely heavily on you guys to write a lot of that content, right?

So for example, every enterprise customer I ever speak to, actually any developer of Angular I ever speak to, says, “Oh, where's they style guide? Where's John Papa's style guide for Angular 2?” So, pretty much if John Papa says it about a style, then that rings true to the rest of the Angular community. And I feel like we need some more of that for other subjects. So, what does it take to get a build system together? What are your options? And what would you recommend to somebody starting? What about testing? I've never done E2E testing with an Angular app. And that's my next challenge from Igor. And so, I google it and there's nothing. Because ng-2 is still new, also there isn't a lot of content for the newbie. So, I feel like having a good content plan that involves our GDEs and our developer advocates is going to be super important to the second half of this year.

And to just follow up on that is if you are doing Angular 2 and you're learning as we all are and you come up on something interesting and you figure it out, please write about it.

Mmhmm.

And [inaudible] a huge mental hurdle. Even when I write blog posts now I'm like, are people going to like me? Are they going to think I'm stupid? And so, every time I hit publish I die a little bit. Then it turns out to be okay. But if you're doing anything, that's interesting and somebody is probably struggling with that and could benefit from that. So, if it's even, “How do I basically get a value out of a form?” or “How do I use ng-switch?” No matter what it is, somebody else is invariably going to have that question. And I just would want to compel anybody who is solving problems, just go ahead and throw a blog post together and it's helpful. You'd be surprised how that will come back to you in the universe and benefits you in a big way.

And you know Lukas, I think people get worried sometimes about doing a blog post [inaudible] because they're worried about the reaction, right?

Right.

But if they put it out there, the way I read blog posts are: it's experience, it's not gospel.

Yeah.

So, if it comes out from one of us for example trying something new out like, “Hey, I'm playing with RxJS,” or Redux, or Ember, anything, it's an experience. And I think as long as people keep that in mind when they're reading a blog post, the experience is valuable whether you agree with it or not.

You hear a different perspective on something.

And I don't…

If it comes from the Angular team, that's gospel. But you always…

Yeah, yeah. As an example…

Yeah. As an example we just published a blog post on our news feed from somebody in the community that wrote how to bind an observable. And that blog post was actually done by somebody who literally just learned Angular 2 from a three-day class. And so, that person went out on a limb and decided to write this blog post. And it's a great blog post. I read it before we knew about it internally. And so, we liked it so much we listed it. And I hope to see more of that coming from people who are new to Angular 2 in particular because everything they stumble over, somebody else is too. It's taken me a while to come to recognize that all of my pain is suffering is not necessarily because I didn't code for a few years. It is because I'm new to this type of development and there are other people in the world also struggling.

And as John said, it's not just about the experience but even more so the conversation that comes from that to where when you write a blog post well maybe you've missed an optimization somewhere and somebody comes and says, “Hey, you could do this a lot easier.” And so, I love it when I write a blog post and then I get a pull request of, “Hey, you could have done this better.” So, even sometimes saying you're totally wrong, but here's a way to improve that. And that conversation is really I think where it's at. To me a blog post is just saying, “Hello. Here's this idea. Let's talk about it,” and then from there getting the feedback from the community and the collective wisdom and knowledge of everybody that's solving that same problem. And so…

You make it sound so awesome, Lukas. It's like I want to join. I want to blog. I'm doing it today. [Laughter]

My only plea to the community would be as the community grows I think that it's important to keep the tone of the Angular community positive and helpful. And I think I've seen enough in my history to know that once a community gets to a certain size it's possible that the internet trolls show up. And I hope that our community all stays really positive and solid, that we are here to help each other and there are no bad ideas. There's just improved ideas. And helping somebody in kindness goes a lot longer than being an internet troll.

Well said. So, Angular hugs for everybody.

And knowing is half the battle.

Yes.

That's right.

Sorry. G.I. Joe reference. [Laughter]

But you're right. We don't need that. The old… I heard [inaudible] say in a group that we were in… it sounds like VB versus C# from 15 years ago. And the conversation we're hearing, people were talking about TypeScript versus ES 5. They were really asking, and I'll ask you this Jules, they were asking about why TypeScript was the chosen or seems to be the chosen language that the Angular team and me and my course were pushing. And we were talking about, is this really have to be an either/or? Do people really have to view it that way? Why can't we just look at this as, that happened to be the first one that was there, but there are plenty of options? And if you want to do it in another language, dive in and see how that works. But getting [inaudible] that question…

Yeah.

What do you feel about that?

Well, one of the things I've had to digest and learn being on the Angular team is that there's no one way. Again, I came in like 'Where's my F5 button?” and in order to have that F5 button there's one way. And that's not true with Angular or this world of web app development which I've come to embrace as a positive. Even working with Igor on the CLI we had a big meeting about it yesterday morning and the one message I needed him to hear was we can't dictate anything. Because we need to the world to be able to embrace what the world works on. And that can be TypeScript, it can be JavaScript, it could be Java. It could, maybe. But it could be… [Laughs] it could be anything. You could be using Grunt or Gulp or CoffeeScript or whatever, right?

And so, making sure that we don't make any decisions at Angular that force a certain path… I think we all have been around the block. And engineering a product means you do have to make hard choices. I think for us, TypeScript made our team work faster and better together, which I know 'better together' is a Microsoft line but it's really true. Because the typing allowed us to find problems in our engineering process far faster than the way it was done before. So, I don't think we're sitting here saying TypeScript is the only answer. I think we would like the message to be, what you want to use we want to work with.

Drupal is a great example. The Drupal team came to us and said, “We want our developers to be able to use Angular,” and we jumped on that bandwagon to say, “How can we make this work together?” And so, there's actually this Drupal project where we're trying to make Angular with [inaudible] templates. And lo and behold a month after we started that, we had a big enterprise come to us with exactly that problem. And now, we have that answer. So, I don't think at least the culture of the Angular team as far as I've seen it, is not “You have to choose this path,” or “We want to choose this path for you.” It's, “Hey, we want to hear what your path is and we want to work with you to make that a reality.”

While at the same time saying, “Let the path that we show you… at least we know this path works, so that you can have confidence that if you choose to follow along with our little scripts or whatever we present it's not the only way but you'll be safe this way.” I think people want that, too. And you know that from being in the enterprise. They want some guidance.

Yeah, I…

One time… go ahead.

Sorry. I was going to say my first piece of advice for the team when I got here and had done a little bit of research was, “We need an opinion.” It doesn't mean it's an only way but we definitely need to have an Angular opinion about a way so that we provide guidance to people who don't have the knowledge to make a decision about a bunch of choices. We're giving them a good solid path to get started with. And so, Angular having an opinion at all was really important to me. And I hope that over the last six months when I've been sort of parroting that in the office every day, that you guys have seen some opinions come out that help guide new people on the path versus, “Do whatever you want and maybe it'll work and maybe it won't.”

Redux [fake coughs] [Chuckles]

Thanks, Joe. [Chuckles]

That was subtle.

That was so subtle.

That was me being subtle.

Well, follow that up, Joe. You can't just go and [inaudible] [Laughter]

Oh, I can. Okay, I'm going to follow that up with an entirely unrelated question. ASP.NET Core, Jules.

Yeah, yeah. How exciting is that?

Yeah.

What is it? What is it?

Thoughts and impressions.

Wait, what?

Yeah, and an introduction.

I don't know if I can give an introduction to where it's at right now. I haven't followed it. What I'm excited about is this new Microsoft that's open sourcing so many things back to the community. And I left a Microsoft that did not embrace this. I left a Microsoft who was not willing to really change product trajectory based on community feedback. Not across the board true, but for the most part. And what is exciting to me when I saw the announcement or I was at the announcement for ASP.NET is this new Microsoft who has recognized that by open sourcing and allowing that open source culture to take over these developer products, the product is actually a lot better. And I think that that's been a hard lesson for them to learn. And so, that is truly an exciting thing for me.

I'm also super excited to see the work that they're doing with Angular because in the Microsoft world that I left, that would not happen. And so, I feel like it is a new Microsoft. I feel like they've understood that their developers also want that choice. It's the same decision process. What am I going to use? What are my frameworks? What are my build tools? And I couldn't be more excited to see next week when we're at Build, Brad, Miško, myself, Rob, Evan, and [inaudible] will all be at Build. And so, I'm super excited to see where it's come since the last I've talked to them about it in December.

Yeah, I'm sure Jules and I could, if you guys got us a few beers we could tell you a lot of wonderful stories about how Microsoft used to be. [Laughter]

And again, not across the board. To be frank, Scott Guthrie's team has always been extremely open to these things. Yeah, my impressions when I worked there was that getting openness from the IE and the Windows teams was like beating your head against the Berlin wall. It wasn't going to get you anything. And those things have changed a lot at Microsoft, almost across the board.

Well, I attended this little shindig last night where they talked a little bit about ASP.NET Core. And I was just really impressed, this idea of having ASP.NET able to run on my Mac or on a Linux box and being able to author in C# on my Mac natively. And then I guess there's some really, pre-built Docker stuff you can mess around with as well. But it just gives you another really nice option for your web server and completely cross-platform. And it had this other cool piece that he mentioned which was the ability to take… once your server's completely built up and it's ready to go you could just zip the whole thing up and you can throw it over on Linux, you can throw it over on a Windows box, a Mac, whatever. And it just, it runs. As long as you copy the entire folder and all of its contents, it's completely self-[inaudible].

Completely xcopy deployable. And they've also got a CLI they're building now.

I was just going to say that, yeah. They have a CLI. And for listeners who may not be familiar with what ASP.NET Core is, it's the evolution of ASP.NET itself. So, I believe that they had originally named it five and then took the tactic or took the advice of their community. I was actually at the MVP Summit when this discussion was happening, that it really was a departure in the way of web applications for .NET and therefore should be renamed. So, I think that's a pretty cool movement for ASP.NET.

So, Angular 2 only works with ASP.NET Core, right? [Laughter]

Yeah. Yeah. Angular 2, you heard it here first. It's actually become a Microsoft product.

You know, I laugh but you know…

Oh gosh. [Laughs]

How many times… I can't tell you how many times I've been asked the serious question of, “Hey, I'm doing ASP.NET. Does that work with Angular 2?” “I'm doing Node. Does that work with Angular 2?” It's very interesting. People have a hard time separating the server from the client with this kind of things.

Mmhmm.

Mmhmm, yup.

But that water's getting muddy too, isn't it, with Angular Universal?

Yep. I'm still trying to figure out the separation of server and client myself and where the best line in the sand is for those things. I don't have an expert opinion. I'm sure you guys do. It's definitely a space that doing the work on the CLI is helping me to see.

So, can we circle back to your role in developer relations and some of the learnings that you've heard. Are there any things that you could share, not private stuff but anything publicly, about what you've learned from some of the enterprises you've spoken with in your first year in the role?

I would say that the core thing that I learned and actually you guys here have helped us solve this problem, is up until our docs came together for Angular 2 the number one thing I was being asked for from enterprises was learning. It seemed like there was a very large challenge and I wasn't here for it. So, it seems like there was a very large challenge with Angular 1 in terms of onboarding and learning the product or the usage of it itself. And the response we've gotten to the docs, thank you Ward, has been overwhelmingly positive from those same enterprises in getting their developers started and getting everybody on the Angular 2 path. So, I think that was actually… I gave a little presentation internally to the core team about three months after I started and that was actually the number one thing that I told them was we have a learning problem. And this was what I

was hearing from our enterprise developers.

The second thing I was hearing is that there's definitely what I'm calling in inflection point between the development of line of business applications which have traditionally been built for a heavy desktop and the developers that have been working at these big companies for 10, 15 years, and the skill set that they need to get from desktop applications to a web application. And so again, it comes back to learning and having opportunities for those people to learn. And the docs have really been helpful for that.

I think the second thing that I learned from them is that we have a communications problem. I don't think that I've solved it. And that is really like with these developers how do we get in front of them?

For example when we do a release maybe one developer in an enterprise company reads the release notes. But they probably don't go tell the other thousand developers what they learned from those release notes. And as a result there can be a breaking change or some feature change that they actually need to know about and we're not doing a very good job of communicating that. I've tried a few things in the six months I've been here. I've tried a Slack channel. I've tried a Google Group. I've tried a Google Plus community. But it's interesting and I actually reached out to some friends at Microsoft to ask them this question. There's no one platform that I can find that can bring enterprise developers together so that I can get that information more readily out to them.

So, if you're an enterprise developer and you have an idea for me, I would love to hear an idea about how I could communicate more readily with all of the developers in an enterprise versus just having the name of one person that keeps all that information to themselves because that's not really the culture of enterprise.

It's a tough problem to solve.

It is. And that's why I reached out to Microsoft because they've been doing this for a really long time. If they had found a way, it would have been found. But that doesn't seem to have happened.

Yes, because we're all drowning, aren't we? We've got email. We've got Twitter. We've got Slack. We've got Skype. We've got… I missed a hundred of them already. And if you can keep…

Yes, you did.

Facebook. I mean, who can keep track of all these places? So, I guess you have to bombard them all somehow.

Yeah.

And they don't even work if an enterprise developer is one of those dark matter developers that Joe's referring to and they're not actually paying attention to those channels. So, how do you reach those people?

How do you reach them? And I don't know the answer. So I…

They're very important.

Would love to have the answer.

So, I'd say the third thing that I uncovered is that at enterprises there are three types of developers and three types of enterprises. And so, the way that I communicated this to the team is the three developer types I was able to identify what I'm calling the hacker. So, that's probably they were selftaught, curious, learning. They're used to an open source community thing. [Laughs]

And then I call the skill builder, which is probably somebody who has all of the developer, professional developer skills, has been doing this for years and years, and they need to move their skill set to web application development.

And then the person I'm calling the manager, who may or may not be a coder, probably listens to Twitter-size sound bites. And they're really looking for the business justification of the investments that they make at the enterprise level. So, this is the VP. It's a senior manager. They're looking for, “My boss wants a bottom line. How do I prove those points to him?”

So, those are the three developer types I found that I feel like we need to talk to. And so, when I talk about content those are the three levels of content that I think we need to address. We need to address the frontend developer who's used to this, the server-side developer who needs some hand-holding to get there, and the manager who needs the business justification to choose Angular.

And then I discovered that there were three types of companies too. So, the first one I'm talking about, I gave it the name of a developing company. So, these are companies who basically develop apps on a per-project approach. Usually the developers are full-stack developers. They use a lot of third-party libraries. They have less internal standards. And they really decide for themselves on a per-project basis what the technology is that they're going to use.

On the other hand of that, there's the very sophisticated enterprise company. Usually this is a company, and now I'm going to use one of my friends because I know he'll be okay with me talking about it, like Thompson Routers who has a very centralized core team of experts that develop a framework for Thompson Routers developers to use. They have architecture, coding standards. They have backend teams, frontend teams. They probably have an internal developer community of themselves and they have much higher upper management needs because they're making their developer investments at a global level usually versus a per-project level.

And then the third one is the in-betweeners who have somehow taken part of each of these and mashed them together. And they're probably the hardest ones to deal with because some projects have a per-project approach and some are, “Oh, we have to have this corporate standard here.”

Those are pretty much the key learnings I sort of uncovered to the Angular team when I first did my evaluation of where we are in the enterprise. I would say the top asks I got were best practices, and thank you all for helping us to accomplish having a set of best practices, a reference app that was not a to-do app is definitely one of the number one things I've been asked for. The why of Angular, why Angular 2, why Angular for managers, why did we choose TypeScript? And then some double-clicking into advanced concepts like what about Angular and SEO? Because that's super important to a business in getting visibility on whatever their end product is. What about module loading? That was the big one the first month I was here. And browser compatibility. How do we deal with the fact that some enterprises actually do have to support IE 9?

So, I would say that's a big roundup of the first presentation I did to the team of my key learnings from the enterprise. I don't think much has changed yet. I think with ng-2's release we'll see a little bit of higher traction of adoption and then that will uncover a little bit more. I'm glad no one can see my face. [Laughter]

I do think you [were able to] tell us everything we need to know. [Stunned] into silence here. [Laughter]

I think it's a little unrealistic too. I don't think anybody was expecting you to come in and say, “I've identified the problem.”

Oh, I think everybody will recognize John's frozen in time here, but I think everybody will recognize themselves in your portfolio. Everybody will find themselves in that list. At least, I can. That means everybody can, I guess. [Laughter]

But no, seriously. I think people will find themselves in there. And they are… I hope are feeling that there is somebody there who understands who they are and wants to talk to them. That's a great overture that I think that you're making. And I'm looking forward to seeing how that builds.

You know I think one of the interesting things for the audience in general when it comes to the time I've put into trying to reach them is Angular is an engineering team. Most people, enterprises that I've talked to, believe we have a marketing department (that's me), believe we have a PR department (that's probably me too), believe we have all kinds of normal product support for a revenue-based product. And we don't. So, if an enterprise calls and asks me, “We need to talk to an engineer,” it's usually me trying to find an hour of Brad or Igor or Miško's time or one of our other engineers. Maybe if it's the router I'm trying to find Brian or whatever that is. And that takes away engineering time. So, I'm really hoping that bringing on a couple of developer advocates who can have deeper technical conversations about real live issues will help us scale to reach more of the specific needs of these specific types of company.

You also run the GDE program, which is kind of like the equivalent of Microsoft's MVP program. But it's part [thank you], part enabling others to come out and tell the story. Can you talk a little bit about that and what your hopes are for that?

Yeah. So, the GDE program is for Microsoft listeners the equivalent of a Microsoft MVP group. GDEs are people that we have found in our community who are contributing back to us. And there's multiple ways to contribute. It doesn't mean you're helping to engineer the core product. It could be that you're helping with content. You're just active in the community doing a lot of meetups, at a lot of conferences, talking about Angular. Those people are recognized by the core team as being invaluable to our evangelism and advocacy efforts external to the four walls of Google. So, I did take that on. Igor was actually managing it before I was hired. Igor is an engineer so hopefully I can spend more time focused on the GDE program.

And what I'm really trying to do right now is get a handle on who our GDEs are, what they need to be successful. Because if our GDEs aren't successful then I don’t think any other developers will be successful with our product. And how we can best support [laughs]… I just [need] more Red Bull? Okay, Lukas. I'll send you a case of Red Bull. [Laughs]

No, no, no, no, no. We're cutting Lukas off of Red Bull.

He's had enough. Calling a cab.

So, one of the challenges I've heard from our GDEs is we don't know how to share what we do. We don't know how to tell people we're doing it. So, if I haven't grown my own organic community project as a GDE then how do people find me? And so, again this Houston app was this idea I came up with to try to figure out who are our GDEs. Are they active? What are they doing? How do we share the work that they're doing and get them visibility into all of that? So again, I'm still working on that app. And I think at this point I'd welcome help. I was kind of closing the doors to help because I needed to learn myself. But I can't get a clear handle on where GDEs are and what the value is that they bring to you unless I understand what they're doing. So, that's sort of my hope for GDEs in the future.

I believe firmly and having been part of the Microsoft MVP program, that GDEs are the first line of advocacy for our product. And if we don't have happy GDEs then the rest of the developers in the world aren't going to be happy either. And so, it's always overwhelmingly pleasurable for me to see how many people want to be as part of this community. And for us, I've been really struggling with how do I get new GDEs on board and how do I tell them what we need from them? And Angular as an open source project actually gives us a great onboarding path. So, if you're super interested in being a GDE then we need to see you active in that community. And open source gives us the ability to do that. So, if you're looking at being a GDE I would say running community events, making sure you're visible and contributing to our platform in some way, shape, or form. Again it does not mean core engineering. And letting us know, because if I don't know what you're doing, I can't actually help you become part of that program.

Well, I think it's gonna be close to time to wrapping up but before we do, I wanted to say that I think it's important for all of us, because we've interacted with you a lot in the last I guess year now Jules, almost a year maybe. It's a very different Google and Angular team to me since your role and you've come into it, than it was before. And that's not a good or bad thing. It's just different. I've seen for example much higher level interaction, not only from you but from Igor too even. Because before as you mentioned Igor was doing multiple roles, probably roles that people would rather have him working on the product, right? The community.

Mmhmm. Yeah, absolutely.

We'd rather have him building Angular because that's what he does, than dealing with the GDE program. So, I think it's a good thing all around for Google to actually introduce the need for this developer relations.

And I also think that one of the things you didn't mention that you're doing that I really appreciate is that you're bringing the engineers out of their room from talking to each other and introducing the engineers to customer, to people out there in the wild so that they have… [I know as an] engineer, I always wanted that, to have customer experience, customer exposure. Hey, I just built this great thing. Jules, can you show me somebody who wants to use it?

I should have mentioned that. I've done a significant amount of work in the past six months to ensure that our Angular engineering team is actually hearing about real world usage. I would say that is one of the biggest problems that I thought when I first got here is no one's really hearing the voice of the customer. Hearing the voice of the developers who love Angular is different than hearing the voice of usage and the customer. And so, I've tried…

Yeah.

Really, really hard. I had enterprise office hours for a while where every Monday I was inviting an enterprise to come and talk to us as a team. I think those were enlightening. I think some of the things that you're seeing, in terms of the CLI, the Drupal project, some of the work that Jeff Cross's team is doing is all based on the fact that I spent an inordinate amount of time making sure they were hearing from customers. And I still do. So, I'll get an inquiry from an enterprise and I'll hook up the right engineer to hear that problem and get that feedback into the product [inaudible] enterprises haven't. Or it doesn't even… I hate the word enterprise because it's not really allencompassing of what I'm trying to do, but it's the common name, right?

Yeah.

I think Google Enterprise changed their name for Google for Work because of this problem. So, let's just say business. But I think having that time in front of the engineering team has been invaluable in making the product move forward.

It's a job that never stops because we all have our own lives to live and unless somebody helps us crack the wall, we'll just live in them. And you're in there cracking the wall. So, that's wonderful. So, we've made you talk that talk. Let's… [Laughter]

I know. I thought this was like a short thing. I'm just kidding. [Laughter]

Not at all.

No, we love it. We love it. But I think it is time to hear some picks.

Yes. John, do you want to go first?

Sure. So, my first pick is Ward and I got together last night and Pluralsight which is a training company that happen to do a course for, and so does Joe and some of the other folks on this show, they offer free licenses to people who do these study groups together. So, this New York City study group, they have a Pluralsight study group, gets together every Monday as I understand it, for many years now, and they watch courses together. And when they do this, they generally will split the course up into multiple sessions. And then afterwards they'll invite me if I'm the guy or Dan Wahlin or whoever is the author to come on and Skype session with them. And Ward and I got to go meet with them last night, talked to them for an hour, got their impressions of Angular, their impressions of the course. I got some positive feedback. I'd say it was 99% overwhelmingly positive. We got 1% “Why did you do this and why did you do that?” as if I wrote Angular, by the way. [Laughter]

But it was really good to hear from these people. So, my tip and my pick is that if you guys don't have one of these groups in your areas, start one. Pluralsight, reach out to them, they'll support you doing it. Very easy to get a bunch of people in a room and watch these videos together and learn a new topic.

Awesome. Ward, how about you?

I'm just grabbing the link right now because I realize as I have a certain amount of responsibility for the documentation I would love to know where you feel, you folks out there, the biggest gaps are, what you'd most like to know. And so, I'm going to paste the GitHub Angular.io issues link into our show notes and invite you all to click and go in there and file an issue for something that you would really like to know. And gosh, even better would be if you'd like to take a crack at it then I'd like to know about that, too.

So, can I jump in real quick and just say something that I would love to see in the docs? Like it hurts me every time is in the examples, if I could see where the imports are coming from that would be oh, just amazing. Sometimes I'm like, “Oh, where's this component loader coming from?” and I scroll to the top of the example and the import is not there. So, I have to go to the bottom, click, and then look for it. So, I think if you had the imports in the examples because they're going to need that, that would be convenient.

That's a great idea, Lukas. Maybe on the side we can brainstorm about how to do that. Because there's an interesting tension between showing that and trying to zoom in on the [inaudible] you want to talk about. And I can say that we haven't known how to get that balance right and maybe you have some thoughts about how to do that.

Sure. Let's talk about it.

So, my pick is Lukas has to work on those docs. [Laughter]

It's a trap.

Yeah. [Laughter]

Star Wars reference. [Laughter]

So, I have three really quick picks. So, the non-code related one, well maybe it is, is I saw this campaign on Kickstarter for GO CUBES which is chewable coffee. So, just think of Drip Coffee is…

That's what you need, Lukas.

Yes. They're pretty interesting. They taste like Drip Coffee gummies. Anyway, they're cool.

The other thing that I think is super awesome, I'm falling more and more in love with TypeScript, is I was doing Frontend Masters this week and I was looking for something. And so, this kind of [inaudible] my suggestion to Ward, is that at least in WebStorm, WebStorm does auto-imports now for your components or your modules [that you're looking for] in Angular. So, I was looking I think for the injector. Typed it out and when I hit tab, it just added that to the top. And so, that was I think in the workshop a lot of people are like, “Well why TypeScript?” I'm kind of, “We're going to go with it,” but then once they saw that auto-import happen I think the lights went on. They were like, “Oh my goodness.” Actually having that support in real-time in the IDE and then seeing the IntelliSense as well of what method is actually on this thing, what's available, I just click dot and then it would just pop up. And so, I was able just over the course of these couple of days, just achieve quite a bit of velocity in this very uncomfortable public form. I really do not like to write code. And actually TypeScript really kind of, was a really nice safety net for that. But that auto-import from TypeScript was phenomenal.

Third pick is I put together for this workshop about over 50 Plunks that are fairly straightforward, really simple.

They're awesome. Did you include the link?

I'm going to put that in right now. So, it's just simple things. Like how do you test a template, injecting a service into a component, testing a service, configuring a route table, navigating to a route, very basic things. I put them into a bunch of Plunks with commentary about what it is. You could actually get in there and play with it. And so, I'm just going to post this link into the chat and share it. And I probably will add another 50 Plunks over the next couple of weeks. The ideas just keep coming. But it's really simple basic things that I put together for the workshop and I realized probably a lot of people would like to see it. So, link is forthcoming.

Awesome. I've only got one pick for today. It's two words but it's one concept and I really don't even need to explain it. But this is one of those things I feel like I've got to get my mouth really close to the mic to let everybody know. Sushi burrito. [Laughter]

Oh, it's horrible.

Jules, no.

Oh, it is. [Laughter]

Oh my gosh. Jules.

I just had… somebody just gave me one of those. It's just a horrible idea.

You're breaking my heart, Jules.

I'm so [sorry].

I'm over here crying.

I thought he was going to say Star Wars.

So now, we have another pair of words that drives somebody crazy. [Laughter]

Maybe Star Wars branded sushi burrito.

Maybe it's because I lived in Japan for three years. I just, ugh, it just did not sit right with me.

Jules, I'm so sorry to hear you say that.

Yeah. Maybe you need to change my mind. I'll challenge you to that.

Yeah.

Like ng-conf we'll get sushi burritos and see if I can tolerate it.

Sushi burritos. I like it. Alright, alright.

Speaking of ng-conf…

Oh, yeah?

My pick is going to lead us right there.

Awesome.

Which is one of the hats I said I wear is our marketing hat. And so, one of the fun things I get to do this year is pick the swag that we give out at conferences. And last year when I joined, I had been three weeks in and managed to get those Angular cardboard and the horrific wonderful story behind getting them actually to the event. So, I'm actually interested, in my pick I have been obsessively going through catalogs and catalogs of different types of swag. So, if you guys have an opinion as our community and our developer group on what kinds of things, not just for ng-conf but for the year, aside from the regular t-shirts and stickers, I'm leaning towards reusable sustainable things. I also had the idea to make the Angular beer glass collection until Igor reminded me that he only drinks wine. So, I'm interested in what you all think, what would be… we've all been to a bazillion conferences and the last thing I want to do is give out yet another mug that no one's ever going to use or bag that gets thrown into your closet and never seen again. So, I'd love feedback and ideas from our community on what's cool.

Angular [inaudible]

Did you just stick one of those coffee things in your mouth?

No. [Laughter]

I was talking to Joe. [Laughs]

Me? No, no.

That's actually a good idea. Thanks, Joe. I'm eating one right now.

I'm eating a mint. I didn't want any of you guys to smell my bad breath.

Oh, look at that Angular mug, John. I have that at home, too. My daughter loves that.

Wow.

It's my favorite coffee mug. Actually, my wife and I both fight over it.

I was going to ask for Angular underwear but I don't know how that advances the cause.

[Inaudible].

Oh.

Oh.

Oh, nice.

Star Wars.

I have a Star Wars mug. Okay, an extra pick. I got a Star Wars mug that you press the button and you wave your hand over it and it spins in circles with the force.

Oh, awesome. That's so [inaudible]

So, I'll save it for you Ward, when you come to visit.

Jules, Angular socks.

Serious?

Mmhmm, dead serious.

Everybody needs socks. [Chuckles]

Everyone needs socks.

Are you going to wear shorts with shoes and the socks so we can see the Angular logo on it?

Socks and sandals.

I'll do it. Socks and sandals.

I was going to say that, but I wasn't going to make it that easy. [Laughter]

How about something co-branded, Angular and Star Wars?

Well, we wouldn't be able to do that without a lot of John's support there. [Laughter]

Yeah, I get that, that's going to happen. [Laughter]

The actually original app I wanted to write was going to use the Star Wars, because I am a Star Wars geek, I'm sorry Ward, I was going to write a little tester app on the Star Wars [inaudible].

I liked you, Jules.

I liked you right up until now.

Aw.

Jules, you know that the big party at ng-conf is on May the fourth, right?

I do.

Yeah. It's going to be Star Wars themed.

You know, in fact I might bring my son and that was one of my… it's so funny because I said I might bring my son and I got the child care form. My son is 18. So, I was thinking about actually bringing him because Brad mentioned that and he would be into that.

Awesome. Alright, well thanks for being on the show, Jules. We've really, really enjoyed having you on. Thanks to all our panelists of course. And thanks to all of our listeners. And we'll see everybody next time.