Last Sunday, October 19th, I flew to Paris to spend four days in the first AngularJS conference in Europe. And this is my summary and some notes about the great experience there.

Full Day Workshop with egghead.io

Monday was the start with a full day training by John Lindquist and Joel Hooks. And I have to say that was pretty impressive to have them in front of us after watching so many of their videos at egghead.io.

But the workshop itself was rather disappointing and it would have been better called “Introduction to AngularJS” with basic usage of controllers, services, ui-router and directives.

For those more experienced with the framework they offered us two challenges building a grid and a shopping cart with the data provided in their egghead-board-game-store repository.

But there came the biggest problem of the conference and it’s that the WiFI of Espace Charenton was terrible and didn’t support the load. So they had to pass the files in a USB key throughout the room but even after, I wasn’t able to run a clean npm install of the dependencies in the whole day.

It was an unproductive day but the slow internet connection and the use of verbose output inspired my colleague Samuel to build with fun the plugin BeBusy.js.

AngularJS Sprint with Vojta Jína

After a disappointing start of the week, on Tuesday we headed to the nice office of Valtech and the place was quite comfortable with internet running smoothly.

Rodric Haddad leaded the event from the start to the end while Vojta Jína and Jeff Cross joined straight from the airport around noon. The sprint consisted in choosing one or more of the tagged issues pending of pull request and try to fix them.

It was great to dig into the roots of the framework and I managed to fix a small issue with the $observe method. Having first hand help from the experts was amazing and after the pull request was merged I can say that I’m one of the +1000 contributors to the core.

As a prove I got a great AngularJS t-shirt and also won an Anker external battery and a monopod (selfie stick) from the sponsors.

Conference Day 1

Wednesday was the big day and the conference opened with Judy Tuna singing about AngularJS; followed by a funny talk between Igor Minar and Bradley Green (video).

There was really great talks during the whole day but I was highly impressed by the speed while coding of Andrew Joslin in his presentation of Ionic framework to build hybrid mobile apps with AngularJS (video).

Vojta carved the sentence of the day “Most code is broken and we don’t know why.” during his session “Can We Learn from Architects?” (video).

I liked to discover Dgeni which is a tool to generate documentation and was nicely explained by his author, Pete Bacon Darwin (video).

I learned a bit more about Protractor during the talk of Julie Ralph and Chirayu Krishnappa who gave some interesting insights like the Page Objects to re-use elements and browser.pause() for debugging (video).

And Matthieu Lux was able to build AngularJS from scratch showing the magic behind the framework with special thanks to Tero Parviainen, author of the book “Build your own AngularJS” (video).

Lightning talks contest

After a full day with thirteen talks by the professionals, there was time before dinner for regular people to show their awesome projects in short talks. These are the four that I noted over more than ten featured topics:

• Wakanda has an interesting product to build Angular.s applications over their own REST and NoSQL database.
• Emil van Galen presented ngImprovedTesting that makes mock testing easier.
• Michael Bromley created a directive to paginate almost everything.
• Rahul Doshi talked about internationalization.

The winner of the contest was Gabriel Obregon with his mocked backend workflow.

Conference Day 2

Thursday was opened by Miško Hevery, father of AngularJS, showcasing AtScript, built on top of TypeScript (video).

Miško was followed by the big talk between Igor Minar and Tobias Bosch which was probably the scariest talk because comparing 1.3 and 2.0, the latest literally kills everything from the previous: controller, directive definition object, $scope, angular.module and jQLite will be gone. Some of the syntax will be different as well but all the new changes look promising as there has been a whole re-think of the framework (video).

I didn’t know about famo.us but Zack Brown showed how to do complex animations with JavaScript achieving the same behaviour in the browser than that of the native applications (video).

Martin Gontovnikas came all the way from Buenos Aires to talk about his service Restangular to handle Rest API Restful Resources (video).

And the speaker who captivated the audience was Lukas Ruebbelke sitting in a chair talking about Firebase and AngularFire to build realtime apps (video).

Unfortunately our plane was leaving early so we missed the last four talks and the Q&A session which I’m sure were as great as the previous talks.

Conclusion

It was amazing to be part of an event like this were 850 developers met together in Paris during two days. So I have to congratulate Patrick Aljord, Douglas Duteil, Olivier Louvignes, Josh Moont and the rest of the ng-europe team as well as the sponsors for making it possible. I have to say also that the food and the wine by the chef Jean-Jacques Massé were outstanding.

The slap on the wrist in this case would be for Espace Charenton not being completely ready for such an event with their WiFi problems; which in any case should have been checked before.

I very much enjoyed meeting some of the guys working in Google and be coding side by side with them. And it was cool to meet and talk with so many great developers from everywhere in the world; but I can’t list all of them here, so cheers for all off you and see you next year!

If you want to know more about the conference there is an useful repository with collaborative notes and links to most of the slides; and the videos will be available on-line soon.

Keep calm and use AngularJS