Two years ago I went to the original edition of ng-europe and it was awesome. Not only was the first AngularJS conference in Europe but also the first conference I ever attended. Since them I’ve been to many others but I couldn’t miss the chance to visit the second edition of ng-europe and enjoy a few days in Paris.

This time I didn’t arrive on time for the hackathon but I was there for the two entire days with 22 talks filled of great content. If two years ago we saw the death of the $scope with the announcement of Angular 2, now we finally have it with us and the conference was all about Angular 2 with a lot of reactive programming.

As usual after every technical event I’m selecting here my favorites for those who don’t have enough time to watch all the videos but want to get some highlights.

With that said the best talk for me was Evolution of Web on Mobile (video) by Adam Bradley, the co-creator of Ionic Framework, who left the framework aside and used cars as a metaphor to drive us through that evolution with beautiful slides and really engaging content.

There was as well three incredible talks about RxJS that I’m listing only in order of appearance because it would be hard to rank them by awesomeness.

First Rob Wormald, who didn’t favor observables at the beginning and now is obsessed about them. With Reactive Angular 2 (video) he gave us a good overview of observables and the Reactive APIs in Angular 2 with some nice tricks like the second parameter to flatMap, the let operator or how to create a dumb child component to avoid having to repeat the combination of async + safe navigation operator in the smart component.

Then one inquiring mind, Tero Parviainen, who wrote Build Your Own AngularJS and now surprised us with Reactive Music Apps in Angular and RxJS (video) where he took the baton to create music with observables. It was delightful and the best part is that you can play “In C” by yourself and check the code because it’s open source.

And finally André Staltz who gave the best introduction to observables I’ve ever seen and built them from scratch making it look too easy. So if you have no idea about what I’m talking then watch You will learn RxJS (video) and, trust me, you’ll learn!

One of the reasons for Angular 2 to exist was to have better tooling and there was some nice discoveries during the conference.

Specially that of Augury which is a Google Chrome Dev Tools extension to debug Angular 2 applications. It was Vanessa Yuen who gave us New Insights into Angular 2 Applications with Augury (video) and with her demo made us all interested to try Augury: visual representation of the components tree, the router and dependencies hierarchy among its features.

The other new tool was Angular BatScanner (video) to analyze performance and Douglas Duteil started with a good sentence “I make mistakes” because we all do; and had as well a hilarious slide: “Just inject it” with Lance Armstrong in the background.

Conclusion

All the other videos are already online so if you want to learn about TypeScript, Angular CLI, animations, custom widgets and much more, go and check them because there was a lot of good content during the two long days.

For many people conferences are only about the content (and stickers) you get, but for me they are also about hanging again with old friends and making new ones because there is always someone interesting to talk to. If during NG-NL I met Igor Minar now I spoke to Miško Hevery, the other half of the Slovak connection, which is for me special because it was in Bratislava where I started working with AngularJS.

The event itself was great organized and they had a nice detail with contributors; after giving us a 1% discount for each commit to the core, upon registration we had customized badge and t-shirt. When In France food can’t be other than great and there was even a chocolate fondue. And most important, despite hosting 900 people, this time the WiFi worked almost flawlessly.