Angular JS Hacknight and tutorial
About last weekend with Angular JS💻
Last week, on the 3rd, 4th and 5th, we hosted a series of Angular JS events starting with an Open house on Angular on 3rd(Friday), a tutorial on 4th from 2PM to 5PM and a hacknight from 5 to 5th morning 10 AM.
Why are you doing this specifically for Angular? Why not Javascript as a whole?
Are you a dinosaur to use Angular and not React?
These are some comments that we got while we were putting together this event. When we first announced about the Angular JS open house, we had little idea about how many people would turn up or what would be the kind of conversations. People started trickling in on a Friday evening and there were conversations. We had Rahat Khanna, who works with Flipkart, talk to us about the state of Angular, features of Angular 1 and Angular 2, and other improvements.
The discussion went great and the attendees had a better idea of Angular and whether Angular might be a good fit for what they’re working on.
On Saturday afternoon, we had Rahat Khanna and Vinci Rufus, from Sapient, conducting the tutorial. The event was at CloudCherry office in Bangalore. They were gracious enough to host us and use their facilities for the entire event.
We were expecting around 20–30 attendees for the tutorial, but 40+ people showing up for the Angular JS tutorial surely took us by surprise.
Weirdly enough, there were a lot of “dinosaurs”!😏
The hacknight started later that evening at around 6PM. Apart from Rahat and Vinci, we had mentors from CloudCherry to help the participants refine their project or give them ideas to work on.
Some projects that came out of the Hacknight
- E-Commerce PWA -Using pouchDB for caching, the team created a homepage with basic products and a product catalog page with prices and product description.
- NewsBook App- A small news feeder app showing list of news sources. On click of a news source it gets the news feeds. They also had a toggle component for viewing the sources as a List or Grid.
- Personal Task Manager- A PWA with Push Notifications for storing tasks. They also implemented storing of the preference of who has subscribed to push notifications and the click on Push Notifications in the service worker.
- SaveFarmer- An application to connect farmers to important Government Initiatives which can help them to get loans and assistance for their crops & farming. It will help reduce stress and suicides by the farmer. The Farmer App could be used to pay premium on the app. NGOs can register to help the farmers in paying premium’s for them.
- Blog- A blog list showing a list of contents and a form to add new blogs. They used bootstrap and customised the CSS to make it responsive and look like material UI along with CSS3 transitions.
- Contacts App — Shows a list of contacts and features like adding new contact, delete, display and edit the contact.
Key learnings about Angular
- Angular JS is widely used in enterprise and FinTech.
- When Google had launched Angular 1, they had a wave of supporters and it went huge. But Angular 2 was completely different from Angular 1 and the migration wasn’t easy. There was a steep learning curve. This is why there isn’t as much support for Angular 2 yet.
- This was also why many developers moved from Angular 1.x to React.
My Aha moment
I‘ve been to a couple of Hackathons. What sets HasGeek Hacknights apart is the culture of collaboration. This was just a phrase until I saw this in action during the hacknight. Usually, we have individuals and teams coming up to participate in the hacknight. We had an individual who supported a team with HTML and CSS. Incidentally, that project came out as one of the best during the demos and the individual who helped them also got recognized along with the team.
At HasGeek events, we have a culture of collaboration within projects and across disciplines.
I would be blogging more about fostering the culture of collaboration. These could be through events like hackathons or hacknights..or maybe something that you do internally at your company! If you have any inputs, case studies or experience about this, I’d love to hear from you. You can tweet to me @dun3buggi3 or drop an email at shreyaskutty[at]hasgeek[dot]com.
