Ng-Conf Review

Ng-Conf just happened last week in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was awesome. Oh blast, I blew the punch line. Anyway, here's my take.

Format

Two days. Early 'til late. One track. 20-40 min talks virtually back to back. Lightning'y? When we broke for lunch, I felt relieved. My brain could go into some low-power mode. Breaks between talks were mostly announced as anywhere from 30 seconds to 3 minutes, this whilst yammering off a short list of swag winners. The format encouraged content, and there was a lot of it!

Line Up

The conference was easy to look forward to. Looking at the speaker list, I was immediately impressed. At one point during the event, Aaron Frost said that they hoped if the Angular team would come that they'd get more attendees. Yes, that was a draw. It was fun having them there. Core. Very core. I believe that about each member of the team took the stage over the two days.

The speaker list in total was very impressive. There was a good mix of local and remote talent who came together to cover a broad array of Angular and JavaScript-related topics.

Talk Quality

Talk for talk, just numbers-wise, it was definitely one of the most high quality conferences I've attended. Of course, there were some less-than-stellar presentations. But, on the whole, I was more than impressed by the subject mastery and teaching ability of the speakers. Thank you to everyone who prepared.

There were also some definite highlights: Dave Smith on directives, Vojta Jina on DI, Brian Ford on zone.js, and Julie Ralph on Protractor.

And one of the best parts is that each of these talks was recorded on video for a livestream and on youtube for later viewing.

Venue

The conference was held at the Little America hotel in Salt Lake City. It was a beautiful location. The combined main ballrooms that the talks were held in were awesome. Plenty of marble. The food was great. There weren't tons of snacks, but that was probably good for my health. The air quality in Salt Lake during the conference wasn't good. In fact, oobleck! But, I didn't get food poisoning -- plus!

Smooth

I heard it said by multiple people during the conference that it was the best first-time conference they had attended. Indeed, everything went Domo smooth. The content was the star. It was fun. It was energetic (minus some confusing lack of screaming for all the sweet swag -- probably had something to do with the sheer amount, like clapping for the 3rd curtain call). The AV crew did a fantastic job. Usually, it's annoying to sit in an audience as video or audio problems plague the start of a talk. That simply did not happen here, and it was oh, so refreshing.

Oh yeah, and sweet jacket!