In the year of Angular 2, the Dutch conference has been the first of an increasing number of Angular.js related events.

Unfortunately there was two tracks and although the videos will be published within two weeks, my opinion is based only in the talks I saw live. If I had to create three prize categories these would be: best talk, most hilarious and most inspiring.

In an overcrowded room at track-2, I think everybody can agree that Pascal Precht with Angular 2 Change Detection Explained (video) gave the best talk of the conference, making it clear that he has spent the last weeks getting really deep into the core of Angular 2 to even find several bugs.

It was delightful to see him explaining the things that cause change, Zones, how the data flows top to bottom and always in the same order, that each component has its own change detection and immutable creates new references; everything embodied in beautiful slides and live examples.

I’ve been doing smart and dumb components for a while now but I knew that Shai Reznik was going to be fun and it didn’t disappoint me. Smart and dumb components in Angular (video) was the most hilarious talk of the conference and probably that I’ve ever seen.

Although not to everyone’s taste, I believe humor is also needed in our techie world and I couldn’t stop laughing my ass off during the 25 minutes he was on stage. With Igor Minar as special guest and a bunch of memes and jokes, he finished explaining how components communicate taking Gerard Sans and Leonardo Zizzamia to the stage, after the blue screen of death crashed his Linux computer.

As it is better seen than explained, I posted a video of the amusing moment.

Todd Motto closed the conference with Which way is up? (video) and it was the most inspirational talk of the day. He introduced us to Jerry The Pirate that could be any of us, because we are still learning and it’s ok not to know everything, and although we might feel out of place sometimes, we don’t need to always use the latest stuff, stuff that either-way won’t be around forever.

It was a brave speech now that we heard so often about the JavaScript fatigue. And he encouraged us to share the knowledge, write blogs and contribute to open source, because nothing is achieved inside the comfort and we all have something to teach our peers.

Besides these three great talks, there was other good content like Rob Wormald (video) doing live reactive programming with Angular 2 or the opening keynote of Martin Probst (video) on the what and why of Angular 2, with the promise that will be released this year.

Conclusion

The conference was set up as a festival, and although the decoration was nice making a great overall look and feeling, I particularly don’t buy the concept: the need of using headphones to listen to the speakers plus having noise from people playing table football or passing around the stage, the clatter of the dishes or even music playing when the other track is not yet finished, felt weird.

But conferences are always the place to meet old friends and make new ones, specially after closing, and that’s the awesome part of our community. So now it is time to choose between AngularConnect or ng-europe.