The first such big Polish conference dedicated to AngularJS finished this week. I had a chance to participate in it and for those of you who were not so lucky I would like to share my impression with you. When I was thinking what should I write, I decided to split it to two parts: organization and presentations. I will start from the latter as in my opinion knowledge brought back home is more important than everything else.
Presentations
I must and want to write that it was probably the best conference I have participated in so far from the content perspective. And I am not talking only about those dedicated to front-end technologies but overall. Actually, it was my first one focused on the UI side of software. The first one, the best one.
Before the conference I expressed my anxiety about such short sessions. Most of them were 40 and some even 20 minutes long. I was not convinced it would be enough to share some useful knowledge. Fortunately, I can honestly say that it was a good idea. It was enough time to get interested by the subject and not get bored and overwhelmed.
Going into the details, my favorites are:
- An empty database in everybody's pocket by Phil Nash. It was not so focused on AngularJS but still it was beneficial especially that it took 20 minutes to show us what types of storage there are in the browsers.
- Using Angular-CLI to Deploy and Angular 2 App Using Firebase in 30 minutes by Tracy Lee. She made a show out of it so it was fun and also there was some content.
- Angular 2, of Things by Uri Shaked. I do not think I will ever program raspberry pi using Angular2 but it was mind-opening presentation. When he showed a photo of diods he used for his game, I realized that Java and even JavaScript developers usually have nothing to take a photo of. He does.
- Progressive Angular 2 apps by Ciro Nunes. The concept was somehow new to me so even if he did not have time to present much code in Angular2, I learned from it.
Overall, I am satisfied with the sessions.
Organization
The event took place in the building of the Polish National Stadium. It was easy to get to as transportation in Warsaw is prepared to deliver people to that place. The conference was located in a big room or a corridor, I thought about it and I could not decide what was that. It looked like a corridor: it was long, pillars, the presentations content was projected between stars from the left and other stars from the right. When there is a football matched it is definitely used as a corridor to get to the stadium chairs. From the other hand there were doors so we were isolated like in a room. So I do not know how to call it.
The sound was sufficient. I cannot complain about it. I heard everything I wanted to. But I am not so positive about seeing the slides. There was one main display but because of the way we were sitted, I do not know, perhaps no more than 30% of participants could see it. Others had to use monitors hanged on the pillars. It was inconvenient as they were small which was a problem especially when source code was shown. Some people prefered to stay behind the chairs in front of the main screen instead of sitting somewhere aside.
Another annoying things was how the coffee was served. We could use coffee machines before the first presentation and during the 10 minutes coffee break in the afternoon. It was frustrating when I spent 10 minutes of my coffee break staying in the queue and an annoyed organizer asked to sit down and continue with presentations. He even asked the stadium personel to stop serving coffee. He stopped pushing after people started to boo.
To complete the whole picture, I do no know if it was only me, but I was cold for the second half of the day sitting there. Probably other had a similar problem as I saw them wearing jackets.
So was it worth?
Yes, definitely. Organization could be better but I enjoyed the presentations so I would be happy to be able to go there next year.