[Does your team need to master AngularJS? Oasis Digital offers Angular Boot Camp, a three-day, in-person workshop class for individuals or teams. Bring us to your site or send developers to ours -AngularBootCamp.com.]
[This episode is sponsored by Wijmo 5, a brand new generation of JavaScript Controls. A pretty amazing line of HTML5 and JavaScript products for enterprise application development, Wijmo 5 leverages ECMAScript 5 and each control ships with AngularJS directives. Check out the faster, lighter and more mobile Wijmo 5.]
CHUCK:
Hey, everybody and welcome to the Adventures in Angular Podcast. [Audience cheers]
CHUCK:
I'm just curious, before we get started, how many of you listen to the show?
JOE:
There's hundreds of them right there.
AARON:
Fifty thousand people just raised their hand in unison. [Overlapping talks]
LUKAS:
Thank you. That was a courtesy hand raise.
JOE:
How many people are still in here just because they haven't bothered to go get lunch yet?
AARON:
Wow, only one guy raised his hand. It's awesome.
CHUCK:
[Chuckles] Yeah, you don't wanna wait in that line. All right, well, we're going to talk a bit about what we've kind of learned at the conference and what we think it means going forward for Angular folks. I'm wondering what kind of stood out to you, guys, yesterday and today?
WARD:
Well first, it's just the friggin' awesome conference. I mean, it is so beautifully run. There's so much cool stuff here. I'm just blowing smoke your way, may man, over there. And Joe, and all these guys. I mean, you know…
LUKAS:
[unintelligible]
WARD:
Exactly, so we got to get that love moment out here because it was really great.
AARON:
Thanks, man. I think we have a lot of fun. Like, I’ve slept a total of like a hundred and eighty minutes in the last three days. But it's like the adrenaline of the event; I don't even really feel tired.
It's a lot of fun.
JOHN:
So what makes the event so great, Ward? And we've been to hundreds of events. What makes this one so great?
WARD:
There's a certain kind of enthusiasm that is very infectious. There is the common community around a single platform. I love other conferences too, but there’s a diversity of topics here; everybody's in on one thing. There is also something to talk about which is where the platform is going, because it's moving so fast. And it's injected; through with all kinds of this sort of fun little candy bits that keep you going.
AARON:
Like the Angular 3.0 announcement.
WARD:
That was just a killer! Who knew that was coming? I did not see that coming.
AARON:
And we gave a release date too.
WARD:
Which was really bold.
LUKAS:
Yeah, way to push the envelope.
AARON:
I know. That’s what we're trying to do here.
LUKAS:
So I think to me, what I’ve enjoyed the most is that the people behind Angular -- the core team and everybody that’s made such valuable contributions -- are actually quite accessible. And so I just loved just the accessibility of everyone. There's people that I look up to and I'm learning from and it's like, “Oh, here's this person and in the elevator or standing here and you can just go up and meet them.” I think that just that accessibility and that intimacy of everybody's super amped to build awesome things. And we are, and we can just meet everybody. I don't feel like there’s really barriers or walls.
AARON:
I kind of wanna talk about that. There's a reason that we didn't sold larger quantity of tickets than last year, Lukas, and it's exactly what you're saying. Joe, do you wanna talk about it?
JOE:
Which part?
AARON:
Just why we kept the tickets down to keep that intimacy.
JOE:
Yeah, well that's exactly what Aaron said, right? And what Lukas said, we want people to be able to have conversations. And we don't want anybody to feel lost in the crowd.
CHUCK:
Yeah. One other thing that I’ve really enjoyed is just that the talks are really concise; they’re all like twenty minutes long and you just move from one to the next, to the next, to the next. And you don't wanna get up and leave either because you might win a quadcopter, so you know…
AARON:
Right or a bacon bowl.
LUKAS:
Bacon bowl!
CHUCK:
I know, right? But the thing for me is just, I mean, I can sit here, and they get right into their topics. They give the talk and then we're right into the next thing.
JOHN:
Yeah, there's no fluff whatsoever. There's no “I was born in a large cabin in Tennessee.” Everything is right to the point. You get a lot of good meat here. Some of the talks are only five minutes too.
AARON:
Those ones were great though, right?
JOHN:
Yeah.
LUKAS:
True story, bro.
JOHN:
Yeah, what about Shai yesterday?
JOE:
Oh, my gosh.
AARON:
Best I've ever seen.
JOE:
Best live talk ever, for sure.
AARON:
I had Misko on one side. Two seats this way, I had Brad. And the whole [unintelligible] laughing.
WARD:
So what was the name of that talk, for people to look it up?
AARON: ng-wat. It rules all talks.
JOE:
Yeah.
AARON:
So two years, zero standing ovations until that talk. I mean, I don't think I've been in a tech talk with standing ovations. Sounds like the Google I/O jumping out of the blimp, Google Glass façade.
LUKAS:
Right. That’s next year, though.
AARON:
Yeah, that’s next year. Ng-blimp.
WARD:
[unintelligible] a lot for next year.
AARON:
Oh, he’s totally, yeah.
JOHN:
So what about some of the content? Like, something I’ve really liked with this ng-conf compared to the last one, and part of the timing, working at large engine like Google, you know that you can’t always time an event and release of a product where it's actually a lot of good information that come out. I felt like there was a lot of great new Angular material yesterday and today. Would you guys agree? [Everyone agrees]
AARON:
Yeah, like it's weird to see… I've seen a lot of shifts like almost immediately and people going, “Oh, cool. Let’s use TypeScript.” And these are people that yesterday were like… or “Hey, maybe we should use TypeScript,” and 48 hours ago, they were like, “Dude, no….”
LUKAS:
“Don't say the t-word.”
JOHN:
TypeScript, CoffeeScript, AtScript, watScript.
CHUCK:
[Chuckles]
JOHN:
I think the direction is clear now, which is good.
AARON:
Yeah. I think it's great. I've currently been trying to decide, “I need a transpiler. I need a babel or I need a Traceur. And I need to take it to my app.” And I've been kind of realizing what that means. You’re kind of on it forever. You don't ever not be on those things. You're never going to not [?] babel. You're never going to [?] on Traceur once you're already on it. The TypeScript is exactly like that. And I've kind of been accepting that that's the reality. I think TypeScript gives you the most.
And I think it's awesome, so I'm kind of excited about it.
JOHN:
What I really like about TypeScript when I got involved in (Ward and I got involved years ago) is it has a promise of keeping true to the next versions of JavaScript and ECMAScript. And that’s what I like is there’s not all the sugar on top that’s making it more complicated and harder to get into. It's actually just JavaScript and you can write es5 and it is valid TypeScript. And now with the annotations into it, to me… I was kind of hesitant last year when I heard about the AtScript thing. I'm like, “I like this but now there’s TypeScript, there's AtScript, there’s JavaScript. Where are we going?” I like this merging.
WARD:
Well, and getting back to your point about all the transpilers, the transpilers are just transpilers, but what was that that we sell? It's tooling that goes with it. I mean, the killer thing there is you're busily typing along and you get that in intellisense. I've missed that in JavaScript a long time. And the fact that it plugs in to all of the different kinds of IDEs that people wanna have. And it's putting all these pieces together and I'm not even having to think about the transpiler stuff like that. And then when you look at the JavaScript code that it emits (and that’s JavaScript code that I kind of would like to write) so all in all, it just seems to me to be more comprehensive and reduce the friction I'm going to have as a developer.
JOHN:
Yeah. If you don't want classes, you don't have to use them. You don't want the interfaces? You don't have to. There’s opt-in pieces.
CHUCK:
That’s the thing that Misko keeps getting up on stage and saying is, “If you want to just go es6, great. If you want es5, great. But if you want these other things that were baking into TypeScript with Angular…”
LUKAS:
Oh, and one thing I can even appreciate about that messaging is that thing is even improved over last couple months, “Look, it's not this or the highway. We're not going to go kill things that…” just even I feel that just the keynotes for me is, I felt really assured where Angular was going. I felt like everybody just got a big old hug, including the Ember guys, which was actually pretty cool. And I’d like to see more collaboration and a more inclusive community. And so, I think not only am I excited about the language, but just the overall mindset. And just the messaging; I think they really took a lot of feedback and they’ve really improved that to their benefit.
JOHN:
Totally agree. The messaging that they came out with yesterday, it was like a hug. There was so much content about, “Yeah, here's Angular 2.0 and it's going to be here, but you don't have to jump right on it.” They are going to provide this bridge, this rails to continue on with 1.x, until he said… there is a… I think the majority of people have moved over to Angular 2.0, then they’ll start thinking about it.
AARON:
So talking about TypeScript a little bit more, I'm pretty excited about it. One of the things that I think it gives us is it gives the Angular community an ability to affect the TC39. Because among TypeScript users, the Angular community will be the largest, like undoubtedly, right? And so, and you can’t get into the TC39 without some sort of factual in-field evidence that this is the thing that helped and we liked it. So giving Angular, so that’s like the biggest horse that TypeScript could have probably [?] fastened itself to. And so fastening that to Angular and giving Angular this cutting edge thing with unsupported syntax will help us say, “Hey, we want this in the language as well.” And the TC39 is going to have to see that we're using it and like watched the results and react. So it kind of gives us a larger voice in the higher level community, and not just in like the user community.
WARD:
Right. It's not just like a Microsoft thing anymore, right? [unintelligible] Google is lined up, who else is going to line up but it stopped being, “Oh, that’s just that thing that Microsoft offered us.”
CHUCK:
Yeah, you heard it first, right? ES8, optional typing.
JOE:
[Chuckles]
JOHN:
That’s the amazing thing; you step back and look at somebody said to you a couple of months ago that Microsoft and Google were going to collaborate in a three-month time span to merge these concepts together so these could work together, people would think you're nuts!
LUKAS:
#Whatever.
JOHN:
I mean, it's amazing how… they both must have gave on both sides when you think about that story.
LUKAS:
True story, bro.
WARD:
Yeah. I mean, when they came up with AtScript last year, I was just crestfallen because it looked like browser wars was transported to the JavaScript language and that we are going to have to face… and by the way, all of the people who are looking for a way to say “Don't get into client side programming,” were grasping at these kinds of things. It's easy; they are all going their separate ways… flavor of the week, blah, blah, blah, you know? So for these guys coming in and saying, “No, no, no, we're going to consolidate. We're going to bring our interests together again, so we have something we can all get behind.”
JOHN:
Yeah, it's not just words. That’s what I like is they keep saying, “Lets reach out. Let’s end this controversy between Ember and React and all these guys.” But it's not just words; it's action. And that’s what I like.
LUKAS:
Testify! [Laughter]
WARD:
Can I have an amen? Amen, brotha!
CHUCK:
But that’s the other thing; we're talking about AtScript versus TypseScript and how they brought them together but then they talked about how they brought in people from Ember CLI and you have some of these other projects. And you know, they are using a lot of these same concepts and a lot of the same code to get stuff done. And they are saying, “Look, there really isn’t this animosity between them. Use what you want and we're all going to raise the bar on everything together so that you can build your apps the way you wanna build them.” And I find that in a lot of cases, people get really, really attached to Angular or Ember or whatever. And then they get disappointed because Ember doesn’t have this feature that Angular has. But you know, if the performance comes up on all of them, if everything comes up on all of them, then the web gets better, our lives all get better and we can collaborate with people and learn things from people that we wouldn't be able to before.
LUKAS:
That was really deep.
WARD:
So for me, the other really important thing that happened here was to revisit the migration story and the relative importance of development in Angular 1.anything and 2.0, because it was very hard for them to articulate how wonderful 2.0 is without casting a shadow over 1.0. And I think they had a chance to rethink that and do two things: one, to reemphasize how great 1.x is and how that continues to evolve as long as the community wants to drive it. So if somebody comes to me today and says “2.0 is not here and 1.0 is going to be remaindered. I guess I could consider and do nothing,” I say no, 1.x is great stuff. You should start there. It's got conceptual continuity of 1.0 to 2.0. Syntactically, it's different, but conceptual continuity, you can get started today in 1.0 even if you’ve never done anything and you're on a great…
JOHN:
And the router is the first tangible aspect of that that you can use; that the ng new new router… [Laughter]
WARD:
The “ng-animate to” stuff, that animate stuff from Matthias was fantastic. So they really brought that home. Secondly, they talked substantively about migration story. You got to go look at that keynote and realize that it's not all big bang. You don't have to throw anything away. They’ve got road maps; we've got roadmaps for figuring out and taking an existing application that is mostly 1.0 and get it where we need it to be if it's a desktop app.
AARON:
So in the past, we heard them say, “You will be able to migrate.” But I felt like I saw the saw it.
Because I was like, “Whoa, how did they both live on the same page? How is a new ng-repeat going to work with an old one?” Well, today, we saw they are completely different. So they can live on the same page. So it's not a complete rewrite of your app to go to 1.0 to 2.0. You could rewrite it in bits. You can write today, this one, tomorrow, the next one. And Brian Ford had that great graphic where he showed you rewriting pieces of your app from the one to the new. So that, for me, it made me feel better about like there will be a migration path as opposed to forcing us to do a full rewrite.
WARD:
Then there's another thing that has to do with migration which I think is critical. What kind of investment are they making here? First, you got [?] run in 1.0. Remember the old guide, they didn’t just outsource 1.0 development, it's still part of the Angular team that’s surrounding it. Secondly, they are putting Igor. Igor has taken it on himself to make sure that there is a migration path. So they didn’t just like hand it down to an intern and gave it to one of the founders of the product to make sure that we have our answers as we try to figure out how to crossover.
JOHN:
And they thought they had to measure all this stuff too which is really important.
WARD:
Yeah, and then they are enlisting people in the community to start building migration mapping, begin talking about how we're going to get from one place to another. And I'm sure that the evolution path for 1.0 itself, (1.5, 1.6) is all about “How can I keep your 1.0 goodness, but get you moving in such a way that that translation is there.” For business developers, I don't wanna talk enterprise. I wanna talk business. Small companies also make these long term investments. They’ve got to know that they can hold it and then they can get there incrementally to the new place. Otherwise, they are not touching it.
CHUCK:
The other thing with the migration and the reasons for migration when it comes down to, “we know what you're trying to do with it, we know what you wish it did better, we know where some barriers to entry are, and so we're going to eliminate as much of that stuff as we can and make things better for you that way. And so then as you move up from 1.3 to 1.4 to 1.5 to 1.6 and you find that you still have those issues or you want to avoid some of the things that 2.0 solves for you, then it's just an easier transition to move up and take advantage of it.”
JOHN:
I just wanna say, again, just stepping back for a moment and thinking about this conversation which is great, and I agree with all of it is again, you look back 3-4 months ago and what was the community spirit? It was there was not going to be a 1.4 or there's not going to be a…
AARON:
The sky is falling. [Overlapping talks]
JOHN:
Heaven forbid, JavaScript is going to change and nothing else changes in this industry except for Angular, right? It's the only thing that’s changing. But it's just a different spirit and a different attitude. And I honestly feel the message was the same, it's just they did it better. I don't think these guys changed their minds. I got the impression that this was just a more well thought-out…
JOE:
Not so much darkness. Not so much lack of knowledge, but actually yes, this is important.
CHUCK:
So you look in that and you're going, “Okay, that makes sense. Given what I know about Angular
1.0, that makes sense with Angular 2.0”
AARON:
We're going to see some more this afternoon. Dave Smith, he's got some benchmarks between Angular 1.x to React, and then he’s going to even drop some other bombs from React to 2.0, that may surprise some people. So that was awesome. I wanna go back to your whole migration story etcetera. Like, I liked that they explained to us their strategy to gauge “When will we taper off 1.x?” And they were like “Angularjs.org is Angular 1.x and Angular.io, this is Angular 2.0. And there's two different sites. We're going to use GitHub and the traffic on these two sites to gauge when we're ready to taper off of 1.x and when we're ready to put more people onto 2.0.” And so it's pretty cool to see them… like they explained to us, “Oh, as long as I keep downloading it and using the docs, that’s my voice saying ‘Please, keep this going in.’” So it's pretty cool. They told us, “We're going to listen to you this way. This is how you make us hear you.” I think that should make people better.
WARD:
It should. And think about what that says, that says we're not jamming 2.0 down your throat, right? Because no, no, no, we have to win your hearts. You can stay 1.x until we win the community with 1.x.
LUKAS:
Well said.
JOE:
I think I’d like to switch a little bit and talk maybe about events and stuff. So like who went to anything on Wednesday? The pre-conference day? Workshops, hack night? Lukas?
LUKAS:
I was teaching. Sorry.
CHUCK:
[Chuckles]
JOHN:
That’s all you were doing on Wednesday.
LUKAS:
Just running my mouth.
JOE:
Did anybody go Wednesday night to anything?
JOHN:
I don't know what I did this morning, much less Wednesday at this point.
JOE:
So Wednesday was workshops. Wednesday night was like a lot of different things. Where did you go to, Lukas?
LUKAS:
I was speaking.
JOE:
You were speaking. [Chuckles]
WARD:
I went to the “Aaron Frost, 3AM in the morning, I'm really tired and I'm still working at…”
AARON:
We jammed out at 3AM. [Laughter]
AARON:
Technically, that was Tuesday though, so. He asked Wednesday.
WARD:
Oh! Wow, it's a blur.
JOE:
All right. I don't know that we need to go all the way back to Tuesday and talk about Tuesday’s ngconf events.
CHUCK:
[Chuckles]
WARD:
I'm lost.
AARON:
No, I said Tuesday. I'm so tired, I meant Thursday.
LUKAS:
Get some rest, bro.
JOE:
Oh. Tuesday was dinner and a movie.
WARD:
Oh, that’s right!
JOHN:
So I have to ask, I didn’t know this upfront and I'll claim ignorance for just being an old guy, walking around, there's a narwhal, a wizard, a shrimp?
WARD:
No, spectral lobsters.
JOHN:
Spectral Lobsters. I didn’t pick up on the relationship until about a day and a half into the event of what those things meant. You wanna explain to everybody what this odd-looking creatures mean?
JOE:
So for anybody that’s gone and looked at the change log for Angular, they name each release with these crazy, whacked out names.
AARON:
Well, they are super hero names, so they are not crazy, whacked out. [Overlapping talks]
JOE:
Sure. If that’s your story, I'll let you go with that. [Laughter]
LUKAS:
If it helps you sleep at night…
AARON:
Okay. So we have a narwhal because there was a release called “prophetic-narwhal”. And we have a wizard on stilts because there was a release called “wizard-props”. And we’ve missed the point on “unicorn-hydrafication”. We thought it was like a… [Overlapping talks]
AARON:
We thought it was liquefying a unicorn, but “hydra” but like with multiple headed unicorn.
JOE:
Yeah, so there was a spelling difference in there. “Hydrification” with an ‘i’ is about water; “hydrafication” with an ‘a’ obviously means multiple heads.
AARON:
#English. [Laughter]
JOHN:
Yeah, I was wondering why I had a unicorn jumping out of water on my badge at first. [Laughter]
AARON:
Yeah, unicorn-hydrification.
LUKAS:
I feel bad for the poor lobster, actually. I went in and said, “Tell me what you are!” It's like, “I can’t tell you!” [Laughter]
LUKAS:
So now, I know.
JOE:
So is that all?
AARON:
The spooky-giraffe.
LUKAS:
Creepy.
AARON:
So, the prophetic-narwhal, the spectral-lobster... [Overlapping talks]
WARD:
I was like crazy rock lobster thing, you know?
JOHN:
I thought you were one of them in the outfit.
WARD:
So funny. [Laughter]
JOE:
Everybody’s got one. All right, so one thing that surprised me about Wednesday was we organized some open spaces. And it was kind of last minute. I threw it together. I sent a bunch of emails. I kind of expected to not see much participation. I showed up at 7:45 and like there's one room that’s full. There's like 30 people around a circle of chairs of about ten people talking about, I think it was testing. And I was really surprised to see that, “Wow, a ton of people had gotten there because they were topics they really wanted to talk about.” So I really liked that and I hope that we can expand on that next year; the opportunity for people to say, “This is the topic I wanna talk about. I know that there are tons of awesome talks that are going to be there and they are probably going to address a lot of my concerns, but this is a topic I specifically wanna talk about.” So they just named a topic and anybody who wants to talk about that shows up. That’s how I got to conversation about keeping up to date with Angular 2.0. David East gave some great information about that. Another conversation about getting your kids interested in programming. I had a really good time.
JOHN:
The Kids Track was great. I really like that you guys do that.
JOE:
Yeah, that was another new thing this year was the Kids Track.
LUKAS:
Speaking of which, ng-extended, how was that going?
JOE:
Oh my gosh, it's so much better than we thought. Did you even think it would be like this?
AARON:
No, we had approaching ten thousand people.
JOE:
29 countries.
AARON:
Over 27 countries. Yeah. The organizers have been amazing getting sponsors on their own to pay for t-shirts and the food and just organizing. We hung out live with Poland and with DC, but there is all over. I mean, there's one that looks like it's in the middle of the ocean, but it's the Canary Islands off of Africa, right?
JOE:
So these are organized events for…
JOHN:
Ng-canary, I like that.
JOE:
And that's on top of just people that just tuned in to the screen because they are sitting at work and wanna watch the stream.
WARD:
It's overwhelming that I had to check myself in to your child care section there. I had to go in there and play with some Lego box.
JOE:
[Chuckles]
AARON:
You're not allowed within 300 yards of… [Laughter]
LUKAS:
I think that got expunged from his records. [Laughter]
WARD:
Oh, that hurt.
JOE:
I wanna switch again and ask everybody to go through and say, so far, what's your favorite moment? The moment you remember so far from the conference? Aaron, let’s start with you.
AARON:
I'm on the spot. Shai’s talk. I've never really seen a standing ovation.
JOE:
I don't know about you, I was a little nervous about Shai’s talk. Like, the wat thing is a big bar to live up to.
AARON:
When we picked it, we were like, “Hey, it's got to be amazing.” So we hoped it would be awesome and the dude excelled with the delivery. It was just top notch. And he ended it with like a real, loving embrace to the community, right?
JOHN:
Well, I think the case of the Red Bull that he drank right before that was helpful. [Laughter]
AARON:
He didn’t even the sleep he had the night before. So I don't know what he was on.
JOE:
Chuck, what about you?
CHUCK:
So, I think one of the things that really stood out to me was during the keynote yesterday morning when they showed the performance. I don’t even remember what it was for – table scrolling, something. I'm not even sure if I knew what it meant, but they showed the linear progression with however many you had and then it's like, “And then we made it better. And then if you use the…” I think it was immutable state or caching, it was like constant time, right? [Overlapping talks]
CHUCK:
…order one, yeah and it was just you know, that’s amazing. I mean, all of the things that we are learning as a JavaScript community are things that the core team is embracing and we're going to get it. And that was exciting for me.
JOHN:
I agree. For me, a lot of it is the community. So I got to see a lot of old friends at this show. You guys here.
WARD:
Yeah, buddy.
JOHN:
We haven’t met before, personally, Charles. It's the first time we actually met face to face. But also, meeting people like Dan Wahlin again. And some of these guys I don't get to see unless I'm at the circuits. And new friends too; got a lot of new people like Shai. It was great. And so to me, a lot of the value of the events is the connections I get to make with people. Sorry, but it’s the people.
JOE:
That’s awesome. We as organizers, we love hearing that as much as we love hearing anything else. We spend a lot of time. We want the session to be awesome, but we also want the people to connect.
JOHN:
And even people who weren’t here, like people on Twitter on the live stream. I keep hearing the feedback over the social media about this conference and it's going well.
AARON:
And so, if you thought this year was great, next year, we got a plan in the works to enhance what you just said, by a lot.
JOE:
By a lot.
AARON:
To attack that, like, majorly. It's going to be awesome.
LUKAS:
You heard it here first.
AARON:
Yeah. Ng-conf 2016 is going to be really, really amped up.
JOHN:
Awesome.
CHUCK:
Along the lines of talking about the extended thing, I ran into a few local folks that I know and I'm like, “So you're here at the conference?” And they were like, “No, I was going to be extended and I came over to see what was going on.”
JOE:
Awesome.
CHUCK:
And so I mean, it's really coming through just how awesome this is.
JOE:
Lukas?
LUKAS:
So I'm just kind of going to piggy back on what John said. It's just I think meeting everybody and hundreds and hundreds of great, interesting people, and to see them… and I'm going to be giving a talk about it this afternoon about just not being afraid of putting yourself out there. And so I write a lot of blog post and every time I hit “publish”, it’s like, “Oh, this is so stupid. Why am I doing this? I probably shouldn’t. They are all going to laugh at me.” But it's really just awesome to hear people like, “Hey, I had this problem and you wrote this blog post and it saved me hours of time.” And so just that interaction of just realizing like I'm not living in a vacuum but you know people, that I have friends out there that actually enjoy the things that I put out. And I get even good feedback of like, this thing was good but not so great. And you can actually get that feedback loop, so meeting everybody has been awesome.
AARON:
Maybe there are just other people in your vacuum.
LUKAS:
Yeah. We're all in a vacuum. [Overlapping talks]
JOHN:
It's no longer a profession for a total introvert, right? It gives an opportunity for introvert to be social and to talk. I think it's great.
CHUCK:
Well, I don't get that because I'm a freelancer; I work at home, by myself. And so this is terrific that way too.
JOE:
Awesome. For me, this is not going to come as any surprise, although I could probably name five experiences that I believe I will remember all my life. Loved [?] last night. Her performance was so awesome.
AARON:
Yeah, that was crazy.
JOE:
But of course for me, the highlight was getting to see my daughter speak. That may got a little bit misty.
AARON:
I don't even know her very well, your daughter. I've seen her a couple of times. I teared up. She was like doing tribute to my dad and it was pretty cool.
JOHN:
It was just awesome, man. Really.
JOE:
Thank you. I've had so many people like on Twitter say the same thing like, “I actually got emotionally affected seeing your daughter up there speaking and inspired me to… whatever.”
JOHN:
Just becoming a role model for young girls. As a father of three young daughters, it's something that I want them to watch too and see what they can do.
JOE:
Yeah.
CHUCK:
Yeah. And it gets you excited about, “Okay, so she's been doing this for a few years now, when can I get my kids involved at ten or twelve or fourteen?”
JOE:
Yeah. And I love the fact that she was able to show something that very few people would think is possible which was, hey, normally you’ve got to learn HTML, CSS, then some JavaScript and then maybe after a while, you can start doing something complex like Angular. And it's like, “No, you can start off with something really crazy because you can show kids. Get them interested.”
AARON:
Yeah. The ngshow/hide concept is so simple, your daughter was like, “Oh, that makes sense.”
JOE:
Yeah. Ward?
WARD:
Well, I have to say, that was one of the most affecting moments for me too. And Shai was the big production but your daughter, her presentation, meant a lot to me. And I hope that encourages people out there. So I agree with what everybody else said, so I'll go back to tech. I was very interested in Misko’s talk on data binding. There has been a tremendous amount of concern about the change and how it is that you markup the templates and all the things that are going away and what seemed to be crazy new syntax. I thought this was something that people should go view his talk and see what's behind the changes because I felt a lot better about them. Still one thing that’s been bothering me. I hate to be a downer, but it's still bothering me.
JOE:
[Chuckles] Ward, you’ve never been known to [?] a punch.
WARD:
No, I’ve got to… [Laughter]
AARON:
And we're out of time.
[Laughter]
[Overlapping talks]
JOHN:
To clarify, you're talking about the upset that these people have on what's going on with two-way data binding.
WARD:
Well, that’s where I'm going now because they still didn't really talk. They have been dancing around two-way data binding. They danced through it this whole time in this session. They still didn't talk about it.
JOHN:
We saw everything else.
WARD:
We saw everything else and so if you look at all these demos, these 2.0 demos, there’s very, very little user input. Now, I don't know how you folks out there in the audience are using Angular, but most of the time, the applications that I'm engaged in are forms over data type apps where somebody has to type something in. So let's be clear, you know, if they're killing two-way data binding, I don't care and neither should anybody else. The problem is not… we don't build applications to have two-way data binding, but we do build applications that take user input. How are they going to do that? They didn’t really talk about that substantively. I know what I don't want to see -- which is what I've seen in other frameworks -- where you have to go through a lot of service, a lot of manipulation, just to attach to each single control because that ain't going to fly.
JOHN:
You have to figure out which event to tie it to that recognize the changes. No, no, no.
WARD:
I don't wanna hear that. So that stuff, they’ve got to come up with something.
JOE:
There was some awesome feedback as people wanna see, “Hey, show me a working form.”
WARD:
Show me some form stuff. Show it to me.
JOHN:
And I think they can do that pretty easily. I think, (to give them props) they’ve shown us a lot of good stuff today. We saw actual code, as Chuck said, but we need to see that. That's a key piece because think about people who would jump into Angular, one of the first things they did… especially from if you came from the Knockout world because Knockout, you have these observables you had to create. It was kind of a mess. You had to [?] your model to get there. In Angular, it's like, “Just take my JSON and I'm happy.” So we need to see what's that…
WARD:
I don't wanna go backwards on that. I loved the way he clarified – in a way I've never seen done -all the changes they are doing for data binding and markup, but this is a gaping hole. I know they’ve got to face it. I know we got to learn about it, but it was missing. I kept waiting for it and it didn’t come.
JOHN:
They went 99 yards.
WARD:
That’s right. No touch down.
CHUCK:
I do have to say though that I'm pretty excited to see what they're doing in May 2015, when they start moving internal Google apps over to Angular 2.0. I mean, at that point, what they're saying is yeah, it may not be ready for primetime, but it's going to be good enough to build stuff in.
AARON:
I'm going to change topic a little bit. So, Igor really wants us to focus here, not on their team, as much but on the community as a whole. So I'm actually going to pick another talk from the community that I loved and it was by Scott Moss. And he got up, and he's like, “18 months ago, my life was hard. Then I went to program, and now, I'm like the senior developer at Udacity.” And I was like, “I suck at life. If he went that far in 18 months like…”
JOE:
Yeah, wow.
AARON:
And then he gave an epic talk. About Hey, Sasqwatch is real. And you're like, dude, this was… and he did awesome. And so that was another one I'll never forget. He did awesome.
JOE:
Cool.
AARON:
The community really came out swinging, right? Whether it's the Microsoft team, whether it's the Netflix team, whoever it is that’s out here swinging, they're doing great, man. I'm really proud of the community.
JOE:
So, we're at 30 minutes. Do you guys wanna take a few more minutes or should we wrap up?
LUKAS:
I need to go practice. [Laughter]
JOHN:
I've got a talk in a half hour.
AARON:
Yeah. I say let’s wrap it and get to the picks.
JOE:
Yeah, sure.
CHUCK:
Should we just start over here and end over there?
JOE:
Yeah, start from that end.
AARON:
All right, I'm going to pick woot.com because they sold me a broken TV, I sent it back and then they stopped selling them, so I couldn’t get it again. But then they sold me now the new 4K version of it. So I actually got a better TV just because of an error. Anyway, so woot.com. And I'm also going to pick again Ready Player One. I’ve read it again recently and my brain exploded thinking about like a movie where you're on the set of Family Ties in like a mech suit. It's going to be crazy. Anyway, Ready Play One, those are my picks.
CHUCK:
Awesome. I going to pick quadcopters. *hint* *hint*
JOE:
[Chuckles]
CHUCK:
If you could rig that deck. No, I'm just kidding.
JOE:
[Chuckles]
CHUCK:
But yeah, I've been reading a lot of books lately. One book that I’ve just read that I really liked was Dreamers and Deceivers by Glenn Beck. Just some great stories in there. Just historical stuff. Another pick that I have is another book that I've been reading lately. It's 80/20 Marketing by Perry Marshall. I think I might have picked it on the show before, but it's really interesting to see how eighty percent of your success comes from twenty percent your work, and how that applies to programming as well as business. So yeah, two books.
WARD:
I know that’s true. I just don't know how to find that 20%.
CHUCK:
Sometimes it's hard to measure. And it's like code stuff, right? I mean, some things is like, “Okay, I can see how many users came because I set an event every time they logged in.” And other stuff, it's really hard to figure out, “Okay, where's the quality code? Which of these things matter?” And you have to learn how to identify those things and take advantage of them.
JOHN:
Yeah, I've got two picks. One is about my kids recently have been involved in theater and drama at school. And they’ve been doing really well in the drama departments they had. What really struck me is how much confidence my kids have grown through this. And these programs are constantly, every year, under struggle of financial strain in trying to keep them going and moving. And I just think it's one of those things we ought to pay more attention to is not just fostering coding, but fostering whatever the kids really want to get into moving forward. Even if there's not a monetary gain right there. It just gives my kids much confidence to go on to do things with theater. And then more on the technology side, earlier this week or last weekend, I got to see Nancy Duarte speak and it's amazing. And if you haven't heard her speak before, it was one of the most moving, awesome presentations I've ever seen. Just gave a really effective way to get across… how to get presentations, how to, more importantly, affect or influence people.
WARD:
And her book is called Resonate. And I think it's really worth a look. Take a look at that.
JOHN:
She's got good tips for role models for young children too.
LUKAS:
So my choice is, Aaron mentioned Scott Moss, I actually worked with him in Udacity. And I had the opportunity to do two days prototyping with him last week and he killed it. So it was really cool to see so many, who you know, eighteen months ago, was just in a hard place, learned how to program and you can get into the trenches. And he just really inspired me to maybe I'm not asking enough from myself as a developer. Another one is Jeff Goodman. I'm going to be giving a talk with him this afternoon and I'm not going to give the punch line away, but he has literally compelled me to be the best programmer that I can be, because he's completely unqualified; he completely taught himself. And I'm not going to get too much into it, but I love people that are motivated, selftaught and they are using programming to change their lives. And it makes me realize I can change my life even more and do better and affect that change.
JOE:
Awesome. I'm going to pick, first off, The Chocolate Malts here at The Little America Hotel. Some of the best chocolate malts I've ever had. I’ve tried to limit myself just to one a day but they are awesome. So if you happen to live here or if you ever were passing through and you want a really good chocolate malt, this is the place to come.
CHUCK:
“If you happen to live here,” and he looks at me. “You're missing out, dude.” [Laughs]
JOE:
So, I wanna pick that. And I also wanna pick also StarCraft 2 because we're also having the StarCraft 2 tournament tonight. I love StarCraft 2 and I can’t wait to see two professional StarCraft players, in the flesh, duking it out after the amateurs have their tournament, you know, to watch real life professional StarCraft players. I love watching. Duking it out for all of us to enjoy and watch. So that's my second pick is StarCraft 2.
WARD:
Okay. My first pick is a shout out to Funk & Flash, a store in Sebastopol, California where I can get my shirts and things like that. So if you ever wonder… a lot of people ask me, “Where did you get that stuff?” that’s one of the places -- Falcon Flash. My technical shout out is that okay, so Angular 2.0 is alpha now. They're going to wise up and you know, try it out, and by May, or somewhere around there, expect to be able to come back and tell us how it's really going. And there will be some conferences that are available. Joe, you're running one. Tell them what it is.
JOE:
It's called ng-vegas. It's May 7th and 8th. It's actually not in the heart of Vegas. It's up in Henderson, just up in the hills on the Lake Las Vegas, which is where Celine Dion has her house. So there's like one side of the lake is all these crazy, huge houses and the other side is this awesome resort spa. So I'm really excited about the venue. It's a fun venue; pools and a beach and paddle boards and stuff like that. And what I really like about it is we can actually, in the call for papers, have people submitting Angular 2.0 topics, which is something we couldn’t do for ng-conf, right? The Angular team got to talk about Angular 2.0, but everybody that submitted the talk, they maybe got to incorporate some Angular 2.0 in their but the talk couldn’t be about Angular 2.0 because there really wasn't anything in November about Angular 2.0 and now there is. So I'm really excited for that. And I hope that we see a vast majority of our talks about Angular 2.0 in some capacity or another.
WARD:
So the second conference is AngularU. It's going to be in San Francisco. The Angular team will be there talking about their findings and we'll also have more people talking about what they've learned working their way through the evolution of it. And I know I will be there.
JOE:
When is that?
WARD:
That’s in June, isn’t it?
AARON:
Late June.
WARD:
Late June. If you're available for both of these conferences. And if you are looking to get hit with what's going on, you got to sign up for some tickets.
JOE:
And I wanna let you know that I will be there speaking.
WARD:
Fabulous! It's going to be great. It's going to be good to see you there.
LUKAS:
Now I have to come.
JOE:
You do. Please come. Yeah, that one is going to be awesome -- in the Mecca of our industry.
WARD:
So folks, go out there and get some tickets.
CHUCK:
Are you planning a pilgrimage?
JOE:
Yes, I am going to take a pilgrimage.
CHUCK:
[Chuckles] Awesome. Well, I don't think we have any announcements or anything, so thanks to our live studio audience.
[Audience cheers]
We'll talk to you all next week!
[This episode is sponsored by Mad Glory. You’ve been building software for a long time and sometimes it gets a little overwhelming; work piles up, hiring sucks, and it's hard to get projects out the door. Check out Mad Glory. They are a small shop with experience shipping big products. They're smart, dedicated, will augment your team, and work as hard as you do. Find them online at madglory.com or on Twitter at @madglory.]
[Hosting and bandwidth provided by The Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net]
[Bandwidth for this segment is provided by Cache Fly, the world’s fastest CDN. Deliver your content fast with Cache Fly. Visit cachefly.com to learn more.]
[Do you wanna have conversations with the Adventures in Angular crew and their guests? Do you wanna support the show? Now you can. Go to adventuresinangular.com/forum and sign up today!]