Raible Designs

The Art of AngularJS

Last night, I had the pleasure of speaking at Denver's DeRailed about AngularJS. Fernand (the group's leader) asked me to speak in December, just after I'd finished a European speaking tour. The Modern Java Web Developer talk I created for that tour included a 20-minute AngularJS Deep Dive screencast. I figured it wouldn't be much work to augment the screencast and create an hour long talk, so I agreed.

When I started creating the presentation last week, I decided I didn't want to make the audience watch my screencast as part of the presentation. They could easily do that on their own time. So I wrote, from scratch, a brand new presentation on AngularJS. I tried to include all the things about Angular that I thought were important and useful for me in my learning process. The result is a presentation I'm proud of and enjoyed delivering.

You can click through it below, download it from my presentations page, or view it on SlideShare.

You might notice the presentation has a whole lot of code in it. Normally, when I copy/paste code into a presentation, I use IntelliJ IDEA and everything works. This time, there was something amiss between IDEA 13 and Keynote 6. I tried using IDEA's plugins (namely Copy on steroids and Copy as HTML), but none of them worked. IDEA 12 resulted in the same problem. Then I turned to other solutions. I installed highlight and copied code from the command line. This worked, but the fonts and colors weren't to my liking. Finally, I decided to try another editor: Sublime Text with SublimeHighlight. This worked great and I'm very happy with the results.

Most of my presentations end with a Questions/Contact slide. For this one, I added a few more: people to follow on Twitter, resources to learn from and projects with useful code. Below are a handful of links that greatly enhanced my AngularJS knowledge in the last year.

• Devoxx 2012 - Re-imagining the browser with AngularJS. This is the original video I watched about AngularJS. I learned enough from this one video to start developing my first app for a client. I wrote about it in a four-part series on Developing with AngularJS.
• ng-book: The Complete Book on AngularJS. A great book with all the nitty-gritty Angular details you ever wanted to know.
• David Mosher's Testing Strategies for AngularJS. I stumbled upon this a week ago and it's greatly enhanced my knowledge of how to test AngularJS apps. It also introduced me to Lineman, which I'm thankful for.
• Egghead.io - bit-sized videos of AngularJS knowledge. Very useful for when you want to learn how to do a specific thing quickly.
• AngularJS + REST + Spring Security. This is a sample application from Philip Sorst (ported to Spring Boot by my good friend Josh Long) that shows how to integrate AngularJS with Spring Security for stateless, token-based authentication.

One of the audience members at DeRailed recommended thinkster.io as a good resource too.

Thanks to Fernand for inviting me to speak and causing me to write this presentation. Creating it greatly improved my AngularJS knowledge and I learned about some new tools in the process. If you'd like to tap into my wealth of knowledge, I'm available for a new gig in April.

Heli Skiing in British Columbia with CMH Gothics

I first learned how to downhill ski in Montana while I was in grade school. A couple times a year, the whole school would go on a field trip to Big Mountain (now Whitefish Mountain). I didn't ski a whole lot in high school, nor in college (at the University of Denver). However, several friends went to DU for the skiing. They'd schedule their classes so they had a couple days off per week, and they'd head for the hills. Two friends in particular, Chris and Chris, were some of the best skiers I'd ever seen. They'd fly through the moguls with legs like rubber bands, upper-body barely moving, legs absorbing the world famous bumps at Mary Jane.

I used to talk about Chris and Chris, long after college, as the amazing skiers with the rubber band legs. I didn't start skiing a lot until I worked for a .com in the late 90s. The VP of Development (whom we now call "The Professor") told us that one of the perks was a "9-inch Rule". The rule was that if it snowed 9", you could take the day off and go skiing, as long as you went to the resort that had the fresh powder. It was crazy how few people took advantage of this, but he and I never missed a day that year. That was likely the first year I'd skied more than 10 days in my life, and I'll bet I skied 20 with him.

I continued to ski a fair bit with my practice wife, then took a couple years off when the kids were born. We got them on skis when they were two years old, and they've been skiing ever since. The funny thing is, I never got really good at skiing until I started taking tips from The Professor. The year was 2010, and I got good enough to be able to ski top-to-bottom bump runs without stopping. Skiing had become a passion for me.

When I met Trish a few months later, I asked her if she skied (hoping to God she did). Her response blew my mind.

"No, I tele."

She went on to explain how she'd started with Alpine, moved to snowboarding for six years and was now addicted to free heeling. I just gazed with a dumb stare and my mouth open.

Last year, Chris M. decided it was high time we did a helicopter ski trip.

Comparing JVM Web Frameworks at vJUG

A couple months ago, I was invited to speak at Virtual JUG - an online-only Java User Group organized by the ZeroTurnaround folks. They chose my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks presentation and we agreed I'd speak yesterday morning. They used a combination of Google Hangouts, live streaming on YouTube and IRC to facilitate the meeting. It all went pretty smoothly and produced a comfortable speaking environment. To practice for vJUG, I delivered the same talk on Tuesday night at the Denver Open Source Users Group.

The last time I delivered this talk was at Devoxx France in March 2013. I didn't change any of the format this time, keeping with referencing the Paradox of Choice and encouraging people to define constraints to help them make their decision. I did add a few new slides regarding RebelLabs' Curious Coder’s Java Web Frameworks Comparison: Spring MVC, Grails, Vaadin, GWT, Wicket, Play, Struts and JSF and The 2014 Decision Maker’s Guide to Java Web Frameworks.

I also updated all the pretty graphs (which may or may not have any significance) with the latest stats from Dice.com, LinkedIn, StackOverflow and respective mailing lists. Significant changes I found compared to one year ago: