Angular 2 Master Class - New York City - With Thoughtram
If you've ever read the Thoughtram blog, you know that the Thoughtram authors - Pascal Precht, Christoph Burgdorf, and Thomas Burleson - are elegant, detail-oriented writers with a masterful grasp of the Angular JavaScript platform. For many of us client-side developers, as we've been diving into Angular 2, the Thoughtram tutorials have served as a much needed supplement to the Angular documentation, often covering features and caveats that aren't even included in the official documentation. So, when I found out that they were coming to my hometown to hold an Angular 2 Master Class, I jumped at the opportunity to attend.
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The class ended up being much larger than I had expected. I had assumed that workshops of this nature were smaller events; but, about 30 people showed up. And, much to my surprise, these people came from all over. In fact, the guy I sat next to turned out to be a medical surgeon from the Bahamas. He runs a surgical department for a living; but, wants to learn Angular 2 so that he can better organize his department's digital footprint.
The format of the class alternated between lecture and lab. First, one of the Thoughtram instructors would give a lecture; then, the class would do a hands-on lab, applying the principles and techniques from that lecture. Each lab built on top of the previous one; so, it was important that each student finished the lab with a working solution such that they would be prepared to start the next lab.
I've seen situations where this kind of progressive coding approach completely fails, degrading into a series of lectures in which none of the students actually do any coding. But, the Angular 2 master class ran seamlessly (with the exception of a flaky and humorous projector). With three instructors, students that needed help were able to receive help quickly. And, when all instructors were occupied, it was great to see students eagerly helping other students. As far as I could tell, no student was left behind; and, no lecture started without the successful completion of the previous lab.
The workshop ran for three days; but, unfortunately, I could only get two days away from work. So, I missed out on the more advanced Form lectures on day-3. That said, in the first two days, the instructors covered a wide range of topics, from basic architecture and dependency-injection, to routing and so-called "smart vs. dumb" components, to template-driven forms and API consumption with RxJS Observables. Obviously, there's only so much that you can cover in 2-3 days; but, with the help of the Angular 2 CLI (Command-Line Interface) and some well outlined exercises, the workshop covered much more content than I would have expected.
Of course, it helped that each day was an intense 9-hours of material. This workshop was no joke! I'm glad that I attended and I was thrilled to finally meet the brilliant guys behind Thoughtram. They're clearly great instructors that know how to run an effective workshop.
And, again, I'm sorry for accidentally locking Thomas Burleson in the bathroom. Toooootally an accident. Totally.
Reader Comments
Ben,
While my bathroom captivity was short-lived, it was and a wonderful addition to the thoughtram NYC trip. In fact, it was just a classic "Uhm-Where-is-Thomas?" event.
I am so glad you came to the training. I feel you already knew most of what was presented.. but perhaps there were kernels of insight that you added to your toolbox of skills?
I cannot believe after more than 10 years of mutual community involvement, we finally had a chance to hangout. Wish I had done it sooner!! Hope to you see again soon.
- Thomas
PS - Great picture with you and Pascal.
@Thomas,
I definitely knew a lot of the foundation stuff already. But, I had never thought about things like Smart vs. Dumb components in Angular 2, and one can never be too familiar with RxJS :D Plus, I live in my own little bubble and it's great to see how other people think about things. It was also cool to use the CLI, which I had never done before.