Category: Angular

The Angular Masterclass

I’m pleased to announce that the wonderful people at Educative.io have turned my book, Getting Started With Angular, into a course. The course is called The Angular Masterclass . The course contains 147 lessons and should take 20 hours to complete.

Course Aims

The main aims of the course are to teach you:

  1. The architecture of a typical Angular app and how components and modules are used to build up the sections of an Angular app
  2. Explore Services, Dependency Injection, Observables and RxJs
  3. Learn about NgRx
  4. How to test and package your application ready for production

Course Overview

In this course, you will use Angular to build a fully-functional sales team contacts application.

To start things off, you’ll learn about Angular architecture and how components and modules are used to build sections of your application.

In the second section, you’ll dive into routing and navigation, dependency injection, and observables.

In the last part of this course, you will get hands-on experience managing the state of your app as well as testing and troubleshooting. Throughout the course are three different assessments which will be used to test your understanding of the material. By the end, you will have a great new application for your portfolio, as well as a better understanding of how to design an Angular application from scratch.

The team at Educative have done a great job setting out this course, the illustrations are fantastic and really help convery the points I was trying to make in the book.

Writing Maintable Angular

I’ve recently given my first talk on the great NgHuston YouTube channel, the topic of my talk was ‘Writing Maintain Code in Angular’.

The main idea of my talk is how we can structure our Angular code in order to make it maintainable for the long term use of the application. In the talk I go through two example apps, both with the same functionality, a book search app, but in the code I’ve tried to show how you set out your folders and components, lead to more maintainable code. That as the application grows it it easier to add new features and maintain when bugs arise.

If you want to see a video of my talk you can, here’s a link to the recording of my talk .

The main points of my talk

In the talk I tried to put across a series of points that are important in writing maintainable Angular code. These points are:

  • Make use of modules to structure your code into small sections
  • Use descriptive property names and function names
  • Make use of methods to write more descriptive code
  • Use Types to create a domain specific language describing the data of the application
  • Write tests that allow you to refactor your code to make it more maintainable
  • Refactor as you go, keeping the code tidy, manageable and readable

In the talk I expanded on these points and try to show through the code examples how to write the example code so it is more maintainable over time.

Here is a link to my slides from the talk.

What painting a shed can teach us about writing software

What can we learn from painting

With the world being on lockdown I recently had time to finally get around to painting my garden shed. It’s a job that I kept putting off because I wanted to do other things (like playing Ghost Recon Breakpoint).

Anyway, I finally started to paint my shed and as I worked away on painting the shed, I thought to myself how we approach something like painting a shed can be job could be applied to software development.

Thinking about it there are five rules that you need to apply to paint that also applies to software development. These rules are:

  1. Always prep before starting
  2. Have the right tools
  3. Plan before starting work
  4. Don’t move on to working on a new section until you’ve finished what you started
  5. Practice makes perfect, well better

Always prep before starting

Before starting any project you have to prep. For painting a shed, you have to make sure the shed has been swept, removing all dust and dirt. Then you have to smooth down any splinters or rough edges and then make sure you have planned how you are going to tackle the work ahead.

Have the right tools

If you start trying to paint a shed with a small paintbrush, one that you’d use for painting a small picture. That would take you ages, and after a while, the brush would be useless through it not being the right tool for the job ahead.

The same can be said for the tools you use to build your software. In the Angular world we have tools like the Angular CLI, Karma for tests, WebStorm for writing your code. You can write an Angular application using Notepad, by why would you. Use tools that not only help you write code, but enable you to write the best code you can.

Plan before starting work

I’m not the best painter in the world so I need to spend a bit of time before throwing paint at a shed I need to make sure I’ve spent a bit of time planning what I was going to do.

So Ive learnt of the last few attempts at decorating that it I need to put in some planning before getting started. This involves working out what part of the shed I was going to paint, where I was going to start and what section of the wall I was going to paint.

Having a good plan for what I was going to do before getting started helped me do a better job this time than I had before.

This planning before you get started on a piece of work should be applied to development as well. Whenever you’re about to start a new feature or implement a new section of an application, spending a bit of time planning what you’re going to do before diving straight into the work is always recommend.

This planning , even spending a few short minutes thinking about how you’re going to tackle the problem in front of you, will save you so much time and probably lead to better written code.

Don’t move on to working on a new section until you’ve finished what you started

One thing I decided to do this time was to paint the shed section by section. This way I could keep track of where I’ve painted and move from section to section once a section had been completed.

Again this approach can be applied to development as well. When building a new application, it can be easy to start on one part of the application then quickly move on to the next, just to get the basics of the app setup. To give you the impression that you’ve got a lot of the application up and running, but this is not a great idea. Say you have a target of having 80% of unit test coverage for your app, but you’ve gone off creating screens, adding services and setting up routes. You’ve done all this work and no tests. Now you have to go back to where you started and try adding tests. But in your rush to get a lot ‘done’ you’ve written code that is hard to test!! So now what do you do, spend more time trying to work out how to write tests for code that is hard to test. All that time you think you’ve saved get all these sections done, now you have to spend more time trying to setup tests.

So it’s worth making sure that you have the section your working on completed before going on to the next feature. Yes, from a project perspective it can look like you’re getting a lot done. Your sprint tickets are being moved into In Progress and Done really quickly, but is the quality of the work you’ve done that good? Making sure you’ve finished to a decent level a section or feature of the app before moving on to the next will save time in the long run and the quality of the work you do as a developer is more impressive than moving tickets on a sprint board.

Practice makes perfect, well better

Finally, the thing I did learn while painting my shed was, while I don’t paint sheds as a living I did notice that this time I was doing a better job than the last time. Each time I had to do some decorating at home, it was a perfect opportunity to practice my painting skills and the more times I did this the better I got.

Now I admit my painting skills are not great, but that shouldn’t stop me from trying. The more times I try, the more times I could practice and through this I was getting better.

The same can be applied to web development, the first website or web application you build won’t be perfect, but only through trying over and over will you get better at writing good quality apps. It’s better to keep practicing and trying this leads you to learning new and better ways of tackling problems. Leading to better apps for your users.

A great book on this idea of practising and getting through this barrier of thinking that you’re working isn’t good enough is Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art where he talks about the resistance we feel putting our work out there, but through getting through this resistance and keep putting work out will we get better at our work.

So while I’m not a great painter and decorator, though taking my time, working bit by bit, using the right tools for the job and not putting off getting the work done. I’ve managed to do a decent job on my shed. Taking this approach can also lead to good quality code, leading to good quality applications.

Working with legacy apps

Angular 11 has just been released, over the last few years, Angular has gone from version 2 to 11 its growth is amazing, and with each release, there are new features and new ways of working with Angular.

While this is great and shows that Angular is still a vibrant framework, it does mean that having a long term Angular app needs to be closely maintained. Version numbers need to up upgraded, test coverage needs to be maintained, there is a lot of work involved in managing legacy Angular apps.

What is a legacy app?

For me, a legacy app is one that cannot be easily maintained. Where the code base is structured in such a way that it takes a new developer on the project a few weeks to feel comfortable in being able to add new features to the app. Where the application structure doesn’t follow any industry standards and where it takes a series of steps to just get the app running locally.

With applications like this, not being able to add new features or upgrade the underlying technology that is running them means that eventually, the client will begin to resent the application that use to make their work so much easier. They become a drain on the clients time where they have to find ways around the problems the old legacy application is giving them.

How can legacy apps be improved

Not all is lost with legacy apps, there are ways to bring them back to what they were. It just takes time, effort and clear understanding with the client that things may seem to get worse for a short while but soon the application they use every day will be better.

What steps can a team take to update a legacy Angular application?

The steps that a team can take when upgrading a legacy Angular application, they are:

  1. Have Unit Tests – tests help by making sure any code changes have not broken other parts of the application. As the code is upgraded, or versions of packages are updated tests can be run to show these changes have not had adverse effects on other parts of the app.
  2. Have UI tests – these tests can be used to show how the app works for the end-user. Even if you have a legacy app that doesn’t have any end to end tests, tools like Cypress are so powerful now, it makes writing end to end tests easier. Having tests like this in place before making changes to a legacy app is a good idea so these tests can be run to check that the app still works as it did before.
  3. Use Angular Elements to upgrade an app in stages – if you have an AngularJS application that can’t be re-written in one large go. Angular Elements are a great way to improve parts of an application in stages. Angular Elements are complete Angular (not AngularJS) applications that can run within AngularJS application (this is a method I used to upgrade parts of a large app for a major organisation. We wrote new parts of the app as a standalone Angular app, then converted it to an Angular Element and loaded that in the original legacy AngularJS app. To the user, there was no visual difference, but to use as development team, we could use this method to upgrade the entire app, bit by bit.
  4. Agree to use an industry standard to how to structure any new parts of your application – if you are going to upgrade your legacy Angular application to the latest version, either through the use of Angular Elements or through a gradual re-write. Then agreeing to use an industry-standard approach to how to structure the update application is an excellent idea. For example, you decide to use an approach like adopting NgRx as the way you are going to structure your Angular app, you’ll find that the developers on your team will enjoy working with a standard approach to developing the application. There would be more resources for them to make use of when looking for the best practice approach to solving a problem. They will enjoy developing an application they know that the new skillset they are learning can be used elsewhere in the industry and an employer it will be easier to get new developers on a project up to speed to be able to work on the project if it follows a well known standard approach.

Our app sounds like a legacy Angular app, what can we do?

If your team is struggling with a legacy Angular all is not lost. You can improve it without completely scrapping it and starting again. It just takes investment by both the development team and the end-user in believing that things may be hard to work with for a bit, but through using some or all of the ideas I’ve listed above. The application can be turned around from an old legacy application that is slow and hardly has any new features. To a much faster, useful application, where new features can be added in just a few weeks instead of months. Making both the developers of the project and end users happier.

If you feel that you need an Angular expert to help you with your legacy Angular app, then feel free to contact me.

CGCSoftware News

It’s been a busy few months to the start of the year at CGCSoftware towers. First, I’ve been busy working for a major organisation helping them working on their existing Angular applications and a new NgRx based application.

Working on an existing Angular application does bring in a few challenges, finding your way around an existing codebase, learning the problems of the application, how it works and how to debug it.

These ‘legacy’ Angular applications are a facinating problem to work on for a developer. Taking on an existing application can put some people off, but I find working on them a great problem to work on. I plan to write some more about this type of work over the next few weeks.

In other news I’ve updated my book Getting Started With Angular in the 2nd edition I’ve updated the chapter on NgRx to use the new version 9 syntax.

So as you can see it’s been a busy few months for CGCSoftware, which with the current state other freelance developers are finding themselves, I’m extremely pleased to be busy. Hopefully it continues.

Thinking in Redux – a Review

I recently finished reading a great book all about Redux, which is the core pattern behind NgRx. The book is called Thinking In Redux by Nir Kaufman. In this book Nir goes through introducing the core concepts behind Redux, including Actions, Reducers and Middleware (which we call Effects in NgRx).

As Nir goes through the book not only does he explain really clearly what each of the core concepts are, but he goes through and breaks down each concept into subsections. For examples, Middlewares are divided in to different categories one for Core functionality, where the Middleware role is to handle a common piece of functionality that could be used over and over again within the Application, e.g handling an API request. Verses a middleware who’s role is to handle Routing Actions.

The book is divided into 8 main sections, the first section is about how to think using the Redux pattern. It’s a great introduction into Redux, it’s core concepts and how we can think about these concepts as we start planning the development of our apps.

The second section is all about Actions, what they are, how we should use them, how to program an application using this pattern and ways we can categories the different types of Actions we may have in a Redux application.

Then Nir moves on to patterns for routing Actions and transforming Actions, how we can use Middlewares/Effects and various approaches we can take when writing our middleware/Effects.

In the final sectionNir goes through some thoughts on a Redux project structure, naming conventions and some recommended reading. While in the NgRx world we have the naming convention set out for us, his ideas on project structure are interesting.

On the whole Thinking in Redux is a good book. It explains the main concepts and patterns behind Redux really well, it’s a short book so doesn’t take long to read. I would recommend it to anyone looking to understand Redux a bit better especially if you’ve just started using NgRx for your Angular application and you want to take your understanding of Redux a bit further.

Agile doesn’t work if your code isn’t

I’ve worked on a few software projects over the years and many of them have been run within an Agile environment.

Agile is a software planning methodology where the work is carried out in small chunks, the requirements are listed in a backlog, which is worked on through these small chunks of development time, called sprints. At the end of a sprint a piece or pieces of work are delivered. This allows software teams to move quickly through the software requirements, be able to deliver software quickly and be able to handle changes in requirements as they go, become agile in the direction they move forward

This is the general theory, unfortunately from what I’ve seen over the years teams that have a Agile project management methodology, but who’s software is still built using a pre-Agile approach struggle to deliver what Agile promises.

The reasons for this are, if your software architecture is still very closely coupled, meaning one layer (the front-end) can not be fully developed in separation from the backend. It is extremely hard for the developers to make quick, fast changes because they run into numerous issues. They may have to wait for the backend team to make a change to an API in order to provide data that the front end needs, if there is no tests in place there isn’t the time for tests to be added or new tests to be written. This can lead to bugs coming into already delivered software and as the team moves forward in their Agile way, the time available to fix bugs and write tests gets less and less, leading to the possibility of the bug list growing and growing.

Implementing an Agile software project management approach is far easier than moving an large enterprise application to being able to be worked on in an Agile way. Arranging two week sprints, setting up a task list board and having a backlog and your ready to go is far easier than getting your software setup to be Agile, but it is possible.

The key to solving these problems is moving the architecture of the project to a more separated approach. Where each layer can be developed on independently, and doesn’t rely on another layer having a new piece of functionality in place before work can start on a new feature.

Dividing the work in a sprint between delivering features and updating the architecture of the application to be more separated allows, over time, the project to become more in line with an Agile approach. The developers can amend the application so the front end can run in separation from the backend. The UI layer can be written in separation from the front-end layer, allowing the UI to be mocked to show users how new features could look so feedback can be given earlier in the process. Leading the feedback being added into the sprints work load before all the other layers have implemented a feature.

Modern web tools can help

Using more modern web frameworks and tools can help. Using something like Angular to build just the front-end Logic, while the UI is built by another developer. This UI can be what is demonstrated to the end user in sprint planning when gathering requirements so the entire team knows what is expected. Using frameworks like NgRx and Nx workspaces allow the Angular developers to move the Angular code add to a consistent pattern that all the Angular developers on the team can follow, leading to a consistent structure allowing any of the Angular developers to work on any part of the application (especially if this is a large enterprise application) without much ramp up time. This can be extremely beneficial for distributed teams or teams with offshore developers.

Tools like NestJS or Node can allow the front-end team write mock endpoints which they can use to build from, while the backend team works on the real production ready APIs.

If the structure of the response is agreed upon, in sprint planning, then the mock APIs (which could return static Json) should be fine to get started building against.

Agile Can Work

Agile can really work as a way of managing the workload of a team, but without an architecture that can support quick code changes bugs will linger and more and more time will need to be spent on fixing issues.

An agile project management approach with a flexible approach to the codes structure will lead to applications that can be delivered quickly.

I like the Agile methodology, but we need to consider the structure of our existing code before going head first to a fully agile approach.

IR35 and it’s possible effect

IR35 is looming over all contractors in the uk, it could be in place in April 2020, and there no doubt if it does come into full effect, then it will change how contractors operate.

For those who don’t know about IR35 then it is new legislation where the uk government is trying to stop those contractors who have been working as full time employees but still being paid on a contractor rate.

The idea is that if you have a contract where you are employed to work for a firm in a role where a full time employee could actually do the role, the. You as the contractor needs to prove that your contract is actually outside the IR35 guidelines. If it falls within. The IR35 rules then you will have to pay the same level as tax that a permanent employee pays.

This is a high level overview of IR35 it is worth really looking into the official government websites in order to find out more about IR35.

How IR35 could change how I work

For me if the IR35 rules do become law then it will change how I currently work. I would have to only take on contracts where it is clearly set out what the project is be working on and when it is expected to finish, to show that I am only employed to work on that project. Another way to show that the contract is outside IR35 I’d need to show that I’m not needed to work onsite, instead I’ve been employed to work as a consultant on a single project, and it’s up to me on how and where I work on this project. So if I want I could say that I work only from my home office or a specific work space. I’ll also need to show that I’m using my own equipment to work on this project, though I could see this being an issue for some large organisations where for security reasons they want people working on their projects to use equipment the company provides.

These changes, aren’t to much of a change for how I currently work, I think it makes me work in more of a freelance working model than a contractors who just works as a extra resource for a company who comes into the office day to day and just works on the same project.

How will this be effecting recruitment agencies

If IR35 does come in it could have some serious changes to how recruitment agencies work. They will have to now find developers who can work on a project instead of getting in an extra resource for a company. It will be interesting to see how they will be changing or will they leave the contractor market altogether and just concentrate on sourcing full time employees?

The contracting market is going to be interesting in the coming months, does this mean I’m looking to go permanent? Well, no. I enjoy working for myself and if the IR35 rules are changing to me needed to work more as a project specialist then that suits me.

I enjoy working on Angular and Angular based project, so if you are looking for an Angular specialist to work on your next web application project, feel free to contact me.

Using Angular Elements for a micro-frontend

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash
Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

For my latest client, I was asked to look into how we could structure an Angular application so it could be developed in different sectors.

The application is made up of 12 major sections, each section performs a certain task within a workflow. So while each section is linked, they each have their own set of APIs which they use.

We also wanted to have each section be set up so it could be developed by different developers within a distributed team.

So we have one large parent application that manages the login and main navigation. Then within each section, we have a complete sub-application.

Possible Approaches

There were a couple of approaches we could take, one was to load each sub-application within an iframe, but this means that each sub-application cannot have data past into in via @Input() properties and, well frames are an old approach.

We could have created a monorepo, which are extremely popular now in Angular, but the client has already built some of these sub-sections within their own repos. They didn’t want to start changing their approach to their repo structure. Sometimes as a consultant, while you know there is a great new way of tackling a problem you need to hold back and follow how the client wants to work.

Enter Angular Elements

So with these constraints, we decided that a better approach would be to use Angular Elements. With Elements, we could create each sub-section application as a stand-alone app, but still, be able to ‘package’ it as an Angular Element. Then each of these elements can be loaded in the main parent application as a web component.

Another great benefit of Elements is that when we want to make an update to a sub-section, we can simply generate a new main.js file for that element. Then we just replace the new main.js file for that element in the main parent application. Then when the user reloads the parent application the new updates to the sub-section are available. This was a great benefit as it means that when making updates the parent application can still keep running. As this application is being constantly used being able to keep it available and make new releases was a real problem for the client and being able to solve this problem through using Angular Elements was win for the client.

How I implemented this solution

To start with I created two smaller applications, one for each sub-section. Then using the ngx-build-plus library from Manfred Steyer, I managed to build a single file, the main.js file.

Then I created the parent application, for this app I used NgRx because as the functionality of the parent application grows I want to use NgRx to make the app more Reactive.

In this parent app, I built out the login functionality of the app, when a user has successfully logged in we store some needed details in session storage. This data can be accessed by the Angular Elements when they are loaded.

So the parent app has two main routes, one for each sub-section, then in each route, we have the main component that acts as a homepage for the section. This ‘homepage’ component is where each Angular Element is loaded.

Through using Angular Elements we can take these large scale applications and break them down into smaller micro applications. That are easier to develop across a team.

Next Steps

Moving forward, we’re planning on building out each micro application, so they are full-featured apps that can be loaded as Elements.

If you have a large scale application, that either needs to be upgraded from AngularJS to Angular or needs to have sections of the app rebuilt as part of a refactoring project. Then using Angular Elements as a way to make smaller changes over time instead of one large re-write is a great way to go.