I attended ng-conf 2018 from April 18 – April 20. Below are some of my thoughts. I will (mostly) stick to the meat of the conference, the content, but will stray into a few off topic areas. In an effort to be transparent, I think the conference was great and my goal here is to persuade you to attend next year.
Pros
- Everything Angular.
I guess this one should be pretty obvious. Everything at the conference was about or at least touching on Angular. Where it is, what improvements have been made, the ecosystem around it, and what is in store for the immediate future. If your livelihood is Angular, you simply can’t afford to miss this conference. - Great location.
I had never been to Salt Lake City until now. It’s a great little city. The population of Salt Lake is about 200,000 and traffic just wasn’t a big deal from what I saw of downtown at any time of the day. I loathe attending conferences in major metropolitan areas and hope to never have to do it again. Salt Lake was a wonderful change. - Access to speakers and experts.
ng-conf is a 3 day conference preceded by 2 workshop days and on day 2 of the actual conference, all day long there were themed expert panels consisting of the speakers touching on topics like security, testing, performance, and typescript. Additionally, and new this year as I understand it, was the Tour of Heroes. This put you in a room with a couple of speakers and let you ask them questions. I saw a couple of the speakers sitting down with developers and troubleshooting issues. I thought this was pretty amazing to just be able to pick the brains of some of Angular’s most knowledgeable experts. Please keep this in the lineup. I do understand this might be a bit stressful for the speakers but this alone made the whole conference worth it. - Community.
It was strange. Every single person at the conference I spoke too just seemed to be in harmony with each other. I was not exposed to any negativity at all and I was very impressed. - Rules.
On the first day of the conference, the organizers laid down a few rules and they enforced them. Breaking the rules means you are out and not welcome back. I think it made everyone feel a little bit safer. - Audio/Visual.
As far as I could tell, these guys and gals were the unsung heroes of the conference. If you decided on one session instead of another, you were able to watch the missed session later. Most of the conference was broadcast over the Internet. The rooms were pretty booked on day one and three because there is only one track but if you were not able to find a seat or if you needed to actually get some work done, you could do so while watching the conference on a huge television. - Speaker roster.
Nearly everyone that is anyone in the Angular community was here delivering a session. The roster was pretty impressive.
Cons
- Location.
Yeah, location is on both lists. It is not as easy for people on the east coast to get to Salt Lake. It is kind of out of the way of anywhere if you don’t live in or next to Utah. - Hap-hazard scheduling.
The schedule for day two was a bit scattered. Typically, there were several (as many as 4 or 5) sessions going on simultaneously and you are going to miss something no matter what. The staggered lengths of the presentations made it a bit chaotic. I had times with nothing that I wanted to see and times when there were 3 or 4 things I wanted to see. Chaotic. - Communications.
While the Tour of Heroes was great, I felt kind of bad for some of the speakers. Apparently, there was some kind of communication breakdown because a couple of speakers had absolutely no idea what the Tour of Heroes was about or what they were expected to do.
Overall, I loved ng-conf 2018 and I will plan on being there again next year.