The two conference organizers Jurgen and Sam (as well as the whole ng-be team behind) really nailed it: “It’s all about the people”. The whole conference was built around socializing, interacting with the speakers and other community members.

It’s all about the people

Just watch the conference intro video:

Youtube

Conference sessions are one thing, most of them are recorded nowadays and thus you can always watch them later if you want. For me personally, the most important part is to socialize, meet new people and make friends. NG-BE was awesome for that. Speakers and attendees were mixed, all of them in the same room, even for the breakfast in the morning. This is a huge opportunity to meet your Angular idols 😉, to chat with people like Todd, Tero, Pawel or even Igor himself :smiley:.

I met a lot of awesome guys there!

New faces, new friends!

And something that couldn’t be missing. Flexing with Igor :smile:

And I met a lot more, many of which I unfortunately don’t have a pic :disappointed: (note to self: make more conference selfies!): Jurgen (@jvandemo), Sam (@samvloeberghs), Brecht (@brechtbilliet), Oliver (@djcordhose), Pascal (@pascalprecht), Tero (@teropa), Oliver (@ocombe), Manfred (@manfredsteyer), Burke (@burkeholland), Tim (@tysewyn), Gerard (@gerardsans), Davy (@davyengone), Sam (@SamVerschueren)…
(send me a PR if I forgot one 😉)

All the official conference pics can be found here.

Special thanks to an amazing guy: Maarten Tibau

You would never guess what happened after I publicly tweeted that I just bought my NG-BE conf back in October. Maarten Tibau offered to give me a ride from the Brussels Airport to the conference hotel in Ghent :open_mouth:. We didn’t “know” each other, we just happened to be connected over Twitter.

@toddmotto same here :) I feel like a VIP: @maartentibau was even so kind to fetch me at the airport when I arrive 😊. Too kind!

— Juri Strumpflohner (@juristr) October 18, 2016

This is totally amazing! And this is exactly what the whole Angular community is all about. People are so approachable, helpful and kind.

Oh, btw, Maarten also made himself a name at the conf as the “sticker man” :joy:

This guy is my new stickers dealer and my new best friend #ngbe #stickers !!! pic.twitter.com/ZG6Xk57BNd

— Olivier Combe (@OCombe) December 9, 2016

Great sessions!

Obviously, there have also been a lot of awesome sessions.

Keynote by Igor Minar: Angular 4 announced

One of the highlights of the conference was for sure the announcement of “Angular 4” by Igor Minar. The cool thing was really the way how Igor prepared for this announcement:

I’ll be conducting a major open source experiment at @ngbeconf tonight at 10pm downstairs in the main room. Come if you want to participate.

— Igor Minar (@IgorMinar) December 8, 2016

If you’ve been following the whole development of Angular recently, this wasn’t that big of a news. The team had already announced their switch to semantic versioning. But still, not everyone heard about it, and the fact they were skipping version 3 was kind of a surprise. Later, I wrote down the main important parts of the announcement, which got then reviewed by Igor and the Angular core team and published on their blog. Read everything about it here:

Or simply watch the talk :smiley:

Other personal highlights

Here are some talks I really enjoyed.

• “Reactive Parenting with Angular 2” by Pawel Kozlowski
• “Angular 2 Forms, the hero we need but not the one we deserve” by Todd Motto
• “Improving Start-up Performance with Lazy Loading in Angular 2” by Manfred Steyer
• “Angular and React: friends learning from each other” by Pascal Precht & Oliver Zeigermann

…and obviously something not to miss: Tero’s talk on “Making SVG and Canvas Graphics in Angular” :smiley:.

All sessions recorded and available on Youtube

But there have been a lot of other interesting talks, like the intro to GraphQL by Gerard or on scalable Angular application architectures by Minko. Well, have a look yourself and on the official NG-BE Youtube channel.

My talk

Youtube

Conclusion

I’ve been doing frontend development, even with Angular 1, for a longer time now. But it’s been roughly since November last year when I started to be more active, on Twitter, by contributing to Angular open source projects, and obviously by blogging more Angular specific stuff. It’s been overwhelming how welcoming, friendly and open the community is.

Youtube

For me NG-BE was exemplary in that it embraced and reflected this kind of community experience 👍. So make sure to watch out for the 2017 edition which is going to happen in December again 😉.

Also, given it’s New Year’s Eve, I’d like to thank all my visitors for the much appreciated feedback I got throughout this year. Big motivation for 2017, thx!! :muscle:

So I wish all of you a Happy New Year! Let’s make 2017 awesome :smiley: