Shai Reznik Founder of HiRez.io, an online school for Front End Development. Organizer of the largest JavaScript meetup group in Israel. World wide speaker, Improv Performer and an experienced client side developer & consultant.

Last Year I Wish I Could Be At ng-conf

It All Started Last Year... I was sitting at home in front of youtube, bag of doritos on my belly, and while watching the first ng-conf videos, I got so jealous….

So jealous of the attendees of the event because I saw how much fun everyone had, which is the direct result of ng-conf’s awesome organizers (Aaron, Kip, Dave, Merrick, Joe and Sunny) and their efforts. They did an amazing job of creating a laid back, fun and super interesting Angular conference..

I remember when watching Ward Bell interrupting Jon Papa’s Talk, wearing a giant cowboy hat and a furr coat, a big smile spread across my face and at that moment I’ve said to myself - “Dude, you MUST be there next year!”

I Was So Afraid To Submit Something...

8 months later, I rememberd ng-conf 2015 is about to happen in a couple of months, so I went to the official website to check the specific dates, when I saw a message with the title - “Call For Papers” and a link to github to submit lecture proposals.

I was like - “hmm… that’s interesting… well… maybe I can do it… I have experience talking at conferences, but not that big… ummm… it’s a long shot... and you have the world’s top leading Angular developers plus the official Angular team coming to speak, so it better be something good! I’m good at unit testing, maybe I’ll submit a lecture about TDD? maybe a lecture about preparing for Angular 2? but they’ll have the actual Angular team over there… nahh… lets think of something else...”

And it went on and on and I couldn’t find a “perfect topic” to submit.

AHA Moment!

Around that time I just finished arranging another fun JavaScript Israel Meetup, where we had one of our top leading JS developers, Pavel Kaminsky, giving a successful updated version of JavaScript Wat talk, which was inspired by Gary Berndhart’s original JavaScript Wat talk.

So being inspired by both talks, I thought - “hmm… that could be a good twist for ng-conf, maybe I’ll propose a ng-wat talk quickly, just to submit something, and later I’ll probably submit a good 'TDD in angular 3.0 migration with unicorns instead of directives' talk to blow everyone’s mind…”

So I submitted the ng-wat proposal, in five minutes, just so I could tell myself that at least I tried… but never thought any of the organizers will take it seriously. And I never got around to propose “real” lectures, because every idea I had “wasn’t good enough”.

So I then forgot about it and moved on with my life…

OMG OMG OMG!

2 months later, Friday night - I’m sitting with my wife and couple of friends at another friend’s house and then I get an email with the following title - “RE: your NG-WAT proposal...”

I know these type of emails, so I was preparing for a disappointing “Unfortunately your proposal have been declined…”

But then I've opened it and it was - “Congratulations! Your proposal have been accepted!”

Suddenly, everything went into slow motion, sounds became dim, my breathing became heavy and I manage to yell out: “WTF?!”

My friends thought something is wrong, they stopped talking and asked “what happened!?”

I was mumbling - “My conversation was accepted” because I was so dazzled by this email, and my wife tried to correct me “you mean your lecture honey… your lecture...” and I was like “yeah.. my conversation...” (which in Hebrew, is the literal translation of "talk")

I then tweeted this -

And this is the rest of my reaction which you can also see in the start of the the actual ng-wat talk.

This Is Why I Was So Happy:

I was teaching angular for over 2 years, telling clients how wonderful it is while apologizing on many design and naming decisions they’ve made, so I would finally have the chance to blow some steam in a Comedy Central Roast kind of a talk, which is a lifelong dream of mine (roasting in a big event). For once, I can show crazy and weird WAT photos (which is my hobby) in front of so many people without being kicked off stage (almost) and do crazy improv stuff I usually do in smaller events, but this time, on the big stage. And the best thing - I will finally meet all of those cool people I saw in the first ng-conf videos (while eating Doritos!) or learning from their videos / podcasts / blog posts over the years.

High Levels Of Pressure!

One week before the event I did a test run with a couple of Angular friends which didn't go so well. They didn't laugh at most of the jokes and I thought to myself: "OK, I'm screwed... The conf is next week!" and began to rewrite everything up until 1 hour before the actual talk started.

I actually didn't sleep the whole night before, and as my time came closer and closer, the pressure and adrenaline levels in my blood were rising. So by the time I went up on stage I was so excited I almost slapped the soundman when he wired me up with the neck mic :)

A Video Is Worth A Million Words

Eventually, this happened:

Ending With a Positive Message

The main motivation behind this talk was to entertain the Angular community and especially, the developers I admire the most.

But I knew I was risking in sending the wrong message to people in the community. And after ng-europe's announcements and the reaction they got, I wanted to end with the same message I ended my parody video about Angular 2.0 with.

I didn't want people to see my talk and think it is OK to complain from now on about every design decision the Angular team makes, and I think we all, as a community, don’t want it to happen.

Why?

Because these guys and the community contributors work their asses off providing us, web developers, the best framework they can provide. So the least we can do is to help them out.

As every experienced developer know, when you build something, you make mistakes. For most of us, it’s fixable because we have the luxury of refactoring.

When building a framework as popular as Angular, it becomes harder and harder to refactor bad decisions quickly, because you’ve got the whole world pretty much depended on your APIs.

And I also know that we as developers, have stressful day jobs with tight deadlines we are trying to chase in every sprint / dev cycle. We don’t always have time to help and contribute.

Heck, some of us are in this business for quite some time we are also use to a closed source mentality where you have to rely on the vendor to fix stuff up and release an update.

But even if we do the smallest contribution, which is to find duplicate issues on github, or to label them correctly, it will help the core team tremendously. No kidding, I double checked with Igor and Misko during a dinner we had one week after the conf, it is really what they need from us all.

So I Decided To End My Talk With This -

Whenever we want to complain or criticize, lets create a pull request (or get involved on github) instead

But Wait... There’s More!

Thank you for reading my personal story behind ng-wat, I hope you enjoyed it, if you're interested to hear more I'm making a “behind the scenes” video blog of my ng-conf experience, with footage I took before, during and after the event.

So if you’d like to watch it make sure you join hirez.io and you'll get updated on this and other Front End Development online courses before anyone else.