Let me begin by saying I am excited for NG-Conf next week! I wish I had the time to take advantage of some of the training sessions Monday and Tuesday, but it's hard to be away from home as my youngest is still less than a year old (Hi Cam from dad in the distant past if you're reading this.) So if your attending and want to say hi (I'm friendly) my first full day is Wednesday. This will be my second time attending NG-Conf in Salt Lake, and I made a promise to myself to be more prepared this year. I thought writing a blog would help me prepare and maybe it would highlight a few sessions that others might find interesting.

So first things first, if you are like I was last year, there are some things you might not know. There is a pretty great app available for Android and Apple that has the schedule, contacts management and some social networking built in. I highly recommend installing it and reviewing the sessions. Obviously you can do that on the website too, but the app lets you favorite items so you can plan your day, the app also has a nifty reminder feature. Next, unlike some other conferences I've attended, NG-Conf uses a hybrid model with Wednesday and Friday being single track and Thursday being multi-track. That last part is the main reason for planning ahead. I am going to try and identify one or two sessions in each time block that I think are interesting, this way I have short list of options to choose from day of (sometimes sessions fill up or maybe a speaker is having a off day, so it's good to have options.) Below I will highlight a few of those.

In the 11am spot I am probably going to attend Productivity Revolution: Angular Principals in Node. If the title didn't give it away, it didn't for me, this topic seems to me to be about NestJS. If you see NestJS and think, ya okay, what is that, well in a nutshell it's a wrapper on Express to run TypeScript on Node. If that's still a bit cryptic think TypeScript as a back-end and let dreams of coding nirvana take you to a place where your entire app is written in one language...one can dream! Unfortunately for me, one of the other sessions I am interested in is in the same time slot!? Crossing Across Platforms I assume will talk about writing an Angular app to run in browser, phone and on desktop (Electron.) It's going to be a game time decision.

Next, at 11:30, my go to will be Testing is a Black hole of time and effort: Avoiding the suck using Cypress. Jessie Sanders is a good speaker and Cypress seems to be all the rage when talking about next gen unit/integration testing in Angular (at least in the circles I run in). Even if its standing room only, I plan on being at this one.

The 12:30 slot is a big decision since this one of two longer sessions for the day. Once again there is a NestJS session Amazing Backends for Angular Devs with NestJS and an equally interesting (maybe even more so for me), Crash Course: Angular and NgRx. Since I haven't had a chance to get down and dirty with NgRx yet, but have played with Nest in my free, I'll probably lean to NgRx.

At 2:30, the other long session, it all sounds really quite good. Ionic is a really neat framework for cross platform, but I am probably going to choose between A Deep Look at Angular Elements and Angular and CSS Grid: Get ready to fall in love. I feel a bit out of touch as I haven't looked at CSS Grid and probably need to do some pre-conference research. If it's cool, I'll probably lean that way, but I would like to see if Elements could help me out as I have an Angular 1.5 app that a client has given me the great ongoing pleasure of working with.

Last, I am completely clueless about the 7 o'clock hour, I like board games, but don't really know D&D, Star Wars or really any of the other things, so I am open to suggestions. If you see me and have an opinion hit me up on in the app, on twitter (@newbish) or at the conference. Anyway, Salt Lake is only a few days away and I can't wait! Hope to see you there.

P.S. Go Rockets!

AngularElements