Photo by Artem Sapegin on Unsplash
Jan 14 2018
Attention: Angular Cli Stories

 

The Angular CLI is awesome, using it now makes working Angular a real joy. If you go back to version 1, without the CLI, it’s so hard to get back into the grove of not using it.
What I love about a CLI is how it has been designed to help you as a developer gets on doing your job. Unlike some other technologies, like .Net or Java the Angular Cli helps the developer without getting in your way.
We all know that the CLI helps you create components, services, pipes, modules and other classes we use in Angular. But one of the lesser known features of the CLI is the Stories that are in the GitHub repo. The great thing about these Stories is, they are small reminders for common things you may need to do when working with Angular, but you usually forget the specifics. So instead of trailing through Stack Overflow for an hour looking how to set up Angular Flex with CLI, you have the stories to help.
These stories are written by the Angular CLI team (though I think they can be added to by anyone who puts in a PR), showing you how you can do more with the CLI. For example how you add 3rd party libraries to your project or how to set you CSS processor of choice so every component you create is using that CSS processor.
There is also another story on how to add Bootstrap to a Cli built project. In the work, I do I use Bootstrap a lot for the UI of the web applications I’m developing. So this story is a real help. I can set up any new projects, add Bootstrap, and use Sass. All with a few changes to the .angular-cli.json file.
I think these angular stories are great. For me, they have proved to be a real help when I need a quick reminder of how to do something with the CLI.
Stephen Adams 0 Comments
Jan 9 2018
The Angular 2018 Developer Survey

Recently Stephen Fluin announced a developer survey for Angular. It’s a pretty short survey, but worth taking part in.

The main question that the survey is asking is what order of importance do developers see these things

  • Tooling
  • Documentation
  • Ease of Updates
  • New Features
  • Initial Load Performance
  • Runtime Performance

I personally think that the initial load and runtime performance are the top two most important features of Angular. The reason for this is clients who want someone to develop an app for them, all they are concerned with is that the application starts quickly and runs fast, which Angular does, but I think the Angular team should focus on getting the load performance of Angular as fast as it can be.

Another question that the survey asks is ‘How else should we improve Angular for you?’. For this, I put that I think the Angular team should focus on showing developers best practices. Now we know the basics Angular now we need to know how to build really good quality, fast applications.

One thing that did come out of AngularConnect this year, was that the Angular team are now focusing on this skill gap. With more talks on advanced concepts of Angular, like pre-rendering, PWAs and performance gains. It’s going to be interesting to see what else the team do over the next few months. Hopefully the feedback on this survey will be published along with what the Angular team plan to do based on the results of the survey.

Stephen Adams 0 Comments