A while ago I did a post on my experience with AngularJS and the highs and lows of working with Angular. AngularJS is a javascript framework written by Google to facilitate creating web applications. It’s hard to believe I have been plugging away at Angular in my spare time for almost two years now.
How have I fared in these last two years? A few months ago I decided to upgrade to Angular 1.5, which introduced some new concepts and verbs that make development better. I have just finished my first 1.5 app (well – finished might be too strong of word) – you can see it here. It may not look like much, but it is actually doing some cool things under the covers. One thing my immersion into Angular has convinced me of is that the architecture is correct. I have been using Web API as my backend, and WordPress as my frontend, and I have the process down on how to integrate all this stuff together. For a non-graphical designer such as myself, incorporating WordPress has greatly reduced the time it takes to spin up sites around my applications. In addition, I have built myself a WordPress plugin which simplifies the work to integrate AngularJS into WordPress.
The other interesting thing I have noticed after two years is I am starting to think in Angular when coding. Until recently Angular code still hadn’t intuitively flowed from my fingers. Hopefully gone are the days where where when I want to do something – it takes 2 hours of Googling and 5 lines of code. Now that I have a decent codebase of angular routines I have written, I find myself copying my code instead of searching the web. I also am getting better at diagnosing the errors better, and thinking a few steps ahead in angular when building things.
Learning Angular has reminded me how learning new languages is such an interesting process. It has been brutal at times, but it also has those ‘ahah’ moments where things start to make sense. Some days I don’t have the mindset to deal with the frustrations of Angular, I just retreat into C# or SQL when I have the need to feel competent.
On a scale of 1 to 10 – where 1 is knowing no Angular and 10 is an expert – I would put myself at a solid 6. I give myself an extra point above average because my experience with other languages does give me an edge. But at least I am feeling confident and fairly productive now.
So where do I go now? Angular 2.0/4.0 is out now, and along with that comes typescript and various other utilities needed to implement Angular apps. I did a quick experiment with the Angular CLI, and it looks like that will help deal with all the crap you have to deal with to learn and implement next generation Angular Apps. Still, its a large jump from Angular 1.5, and frankly, I am in no hurry to leap. I am going to bask in the confidence of my 1.5 abilities for awhile, continue to hone my 1.5 skills, and write some cool things. But I still think in the long term, Angular is going to win a lot of developers hearts and be a leading platform in the future.