An Angular expert’s insights: Top 5 quotes from ng-conf

This year’s ng-conf (the largest annual Angular conference) was June 14-15th in Salt Lake City, Utah, and marked the 10th anniversary of the very first ng-conf. That’s ten years of Angular knowledge, community, and connection, and it was an incredible event to be a part of. This was my first time attending, and I knew it would be special from the start.  I spent both days furiously scribbling in my notebook and today I’m going to share my favorite quotes and takeaways from the conference.

Before the kickoff, Frosty (one of the co-founders of the conference) made a short introductory speech, and mentioned the importance of pride, acceptance, and safety for the community, and I immediately felt welcome. Being a woman in tech can sometimes feel isolating, but ng-conf felt safe and comfortable. 

Minko Gechev and Jeremy Elbourn kicked off the conference with the Angular Keynote. They talked about many exciting new features for Angular, like more performant change detection, server-side rendering, lots of quality-of-life improvements and a better developer experience overall. Many of the new features are based on Github feature requests by developers, which collectively have over 2,500 thumbs up on version 16 alone. At this point, Jeremy pointed out, “If they were real human thumbs up, lengthwise, they would be a bit longer than three Olympic-sized swimming pools.”

It was such a delightfully funny visual that drove home how the team listens to its users.  I’m excited for control flow improvements; I think the proposed new syntax is much more intuitive. It’s clear that the Angular team has their developers in mind, and they closed out the keynote by reiterating that stability and reliability are at the core of their decisions. I look forward to seeing these new changes roll out!

In Frosty’s pre-kickoff talk, he asked the audience what everyone was excited to learn about during this year’s conference and the audience shouted out, almost in unison, “SIGNALS!” If I had to sum up the conference in one word, it would be this. Signals are in developer preview in v16, and they’re a great new tool that improves Angular’s change detection.

Deborah Kurata gave a great overview of her "Go Reactive with Angular Signals" talk. She has a code demo on StackBlitz as well as a video on her Youtube. Essentially, signals are a new way to tell templates and code that our data has changed. Listening for data changing can be a headache, especially in components where you can easily get lost in nests of subscribes and unsubscribes. But with Signals, a lot of that is automatically handled! The audience broke into applause at this point, myself included. My team has wished out loud for that exact feature more than once. 

Emma Twerksy and Alex Rickabaugh gave another Signals talk, Superpowers with Signals, where they built a superhero trading card app that demonstrated the new feature. It was neat to see it in action, and with a fun nod to the overall comic book theme of the conference. The app even generated superpowers from whatever name they typed in; Alex said they “might be generated by AI, might be random,” but the AI part got me thinking and leads perfectly to my next quote…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is undeniably on the rise. It’s been a part of many, many conversations I’ve had with coworkers and friends, split between being excited about the new possibilities and worried about what it means for our jobs.

John Papa gave a really great talk about AI (Do More using GitHub, AI, and VS Code) where he compared using AI to programming with a buddy on Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow may not always have the right answers, you still need to understand your own code before you can copy and paste, but it can be a great tool, and so can AI! He did a live demo with GitHub Copilot which garnered a lot of well-deserved applause. 

His talk was a popular topic as we broke for lunch afterward and I made conversation with the other attendees at my table. Many developers are worried about being replaced by AI, even more so after seeing demos on just how powerful it will be for writing code. An attendee at my table perfectly summed it up AI won’t replace developers. Developers who know how to use AI will replace those who don’t.” I couldn’t agree more; tools like this are going to change the entire tech landscape, and developers who know how to use them will be far more productive than those who don’t. I don’t think tools like GitHub Copilot will ever be able to replace engineers completely, but I do think that learning to use them effectively is going to be incredibly powerful. 

Thinking about all of the exciting new advances in technology and AI and Angular can be a little (ok, a lot) overwhelming. Having so many tools to pick from is great, but making a choice and getting started can be difficult. This was the sentiment in Johanna Pearce’s talk “Angular - A Matter of Opinion.”

Having too many choices can paralyze us into inaction. We worry about the potential regret of leaving other options or approaches on the table. Being overloaded with new information can feel physically stressful. Angular has a lot of information and choices. New features like signals may be easier to use in some cases, but they won’t completely replace old patterns, so it layers on a new choice that developers will have to make. Evaluating the best architecture can be complicated, even for experienced devs. Johanna’s comment, “Seeing Angular in its entirety can make you feel like if you’re not using all of it, you’re using it wrong,” really stuck with me. 

A large framework like Angular is an incredibly powerful tool, and can be overwhelming. It was validating to hear that out loud. No matter if you’re picking up the framework for the first time as a new developer, or a seasoned tech lead catching up on the latest features, know that you don’t need to know all of it at once. Everyone at the conference was there to learn something new.

I love being a web developer and learning new things about Angular. Being on the cutting edge of cool design and cool apps can sometimes feel reserved for mobile (mobile-first design, anyone?), so reminding ourselves that websites can still be just as great is important. Beautiful, performant apps don’t have to be only for native, and that was at the core of Mike Hartington’s talk, “Delighting Users with Performant Apps.”

Mike’s talk got into the nitty gritty of imagining a web app created to perform just as well and have all the cool effects that a mobile app does. The devs in his story regularly reminded themselves, “we can have nice things.” It may take a little extra thought and effort, but the web has so many tools to create amazing experiences.

Everything I’ve mentioned so far: New Angular improvements, Signals, AI and a crazy amount of choices all come together to give us a ton of power in what and how we create. We should always keep our users and their experiences in mind and make our websites functional, performant, beautiful and delightful. We can absolutely have and create nice things, and I’m happy to be a part of it all. 

Overall, ng-conf 2023 was a fantastic experience. I learned so much about Angular and got to network and discuss web development with some cool new people! All speakers and organizers deserve at least a full Olympic swimming pool’s worth of thumbs-ups.