AngularJS has been a library that I never really saw the point of, back end server languages + the excellent front end frameworks such as jQuery and bootstrap have always delivered far more than even my most demanding corporate clients could want or need,  however while booking my ticket to the jQuery conference 2014 I  noticed that one of the workshops being held beforehand was entitled ‘Diving into AngularJS’  I figured that perhaps I just did not appreciate the framework’s better points and I should man up and learn it, also the fact it was being presented by Peter Bacon Darwin a well known member of the AngularJS world and a published author was not going to hurt

Initially I thought I had made a mistake, there were lots of mistakes in the printed version of the exercises and a distinct lack of structure to the course, then I pulled the stick out my arse and started playing proper attention,  the course was never designed to be completed in one day the material is a full course that you can do at your own leisure with all materials located on https://github.com/petebacondarwin/foodme,  Peter was there to guide you over the tricky humps, answer your questions and WTF moments as well as give you the background reasoning to a lot of the baffling areas of angular, 

The day was in microcosm an exact replica of the classic AngularJS learning curve —V and Peter’s presence was the reason for that, hopefully this means I wont hit this save curve on a live project

In additional it provided me with a personal epiphany when it comes to javascript, I have never really enjoyed the asynchronous nature of javascript, it never had the same control that I am used to with things like Java multi-threading or better still Scala’s Actors, but peter took me though the whole thing and introduced me to the https://github.com/kriskowal/q library and its AngularJS derivative $q, I had been using javascript promises the same as everyone else (even if we don’t call them that) but this really opened my eyes on the whole subject :)

Frankly put I learnt more than my brain can absorb in a day, very very good value

Filed under Jquery 2014, Conference, linkedin.