From new levels of stability to an amazing ecosystem, we’re convinced that 2018 is a great time to be an Angular Developer. Our SVP of Developer Tools, Jason Beres recently had a chance to sit down with Stephen Fluin, Developer Advocate on the Angular team at Google. This is the third of three parts of the conversation including the future of Native apps vs. PWAs, Server Side Rendering, and this post with Angular team’s advice for Enterprise Developers.
Jason Beres: You travel the world all year, you're on the road talking to customers at events like Angular Mix and Angular Connect.
When you're in front of your actual enterprise customers, and what do you tell them? What's your suggestion for them when they ask the tough questions like, "Oh, is this the right bet? Where's it going?"
Do you have any general thoughts for the developer audience at large to kind of give them peek at what you might say to a customer at a trade show?
Stephen Fluin: Some people may have heard me say this before, so I'll kind of start with what I said in the keynote at Angular Connect, where I actually do feel like at this point it's a great time to be an Angular developer.
We've achieved a level of stability and a level of innovation that we feel really, really confident, solves a lot of the people's problems and we'll help them build better experiences and better applications for their users.
Specifically, when it comes to our enterprise users, I often talk about five reasons why they choose Angular.
First, we talk about how Angular is opinionated. We make a lot of choices for you. Things like TypeScript. Things like HP client that try and help you build more maintainable, more scalable applications kind of automatically.
Second, we talk about being trustworthy. We have very clear semantics so you know exactly what's coming and releases. We're also committed to very smooth update process between versions. This is something we're spending a lot of time worrying about, all the way to the extent that for example within Google, where there's more than 300 applications or projects using Angular, every time we make a breaking change, we actually have to go update those 300 applications. So we have an intimate knowledge of when and how breaking changes affect the ecosystem and so we're highly incentivized to minimize those. But at the same time, we do want to keep innovating.
And it's this idea of trustworthiness I think is something that we wanted to start building when we shipped version 2.0.0 back in September of 2016 and over the past year or more, we've kind of proven that we're capable of doing that.
Third, we talk about Angular being scaled. We obviously design for solving kind of Google-scale problems. But that's not just in terms of number of users or number of developers. It's also in terms of a diversity of team roles. You see when we get large teams, you end up having a shared services org in the company or you end up seeing architects being distinct from developers being distinct from designers. And Angular is really designed with some of that thinking in mind, where you can have architects focusing on the module level. Where should we be lazy loading? How should we be building this platform? Developers more focused on the component level within a module. And then designers focused on the template.
And matches how people kind of want to build software.
So we've got opinionated, trustworthy, scaled.
Fourth, we talk about ecosystems. We have a fantastic ecosystem.
Just being at Angular Connect and hearing from people and talking to people, there are so many great companies that not only want to use Angular but want to give back to each other and work together
Beres: It's amazing the number of developers that are so engaged in the community - in the open source community. It's very impressive.
Fluin: Yes. Absolutely. I think our community's just fantastic in terms of the way that they exemplify a lot of our values in terms of respect and being welcoming.
We explicitly we ask our community not to go and criticize other people because there’s a little bit too much fighting and we can all work together and we can all learn from each other.
When one of us wins in an open collaborative matter, we all win. That's definitely a huge part of how we think about things.
The last one that we talk about is Angular as being familiar. Whether you're coming from AngularJS where we have a lot of the same philosophies, declarative templates, dependency injection services layer, even the components now existing in your JS. Or if you're coming from a Java world or a .NET world, and you're very used to this application mentality but you're maybe new to the web, Angular ends up being a very familiar entry point to delivering the kind of experiences that customers expect in 2017, 2018 and beyond.
Beres: So, as the Angular lead for all of the ecosystem and community out there, what would success in five years look like for you. When we're sitting here and toasting champagne and eating strawberries, you're like, "We made it." What does reaching that point look like for you?
Fluin: I would go back to three of the Angular core values that we talk about. Applications that you just love to use, developers love to build, and a community where everyone feels welcome.
I think if we can hold true to that and five years from now we're still taking advantage of the modern web, and releasing smooth updates and maintaining the level of innovation that developers kind of want.
There's this magic feeling when we can just flip a switch and they have a PWA for the first time. If we can keep that level of magic and stability at the same time, which is very challenging, I will feel fantastic about how we've kind of progressed.
Beres: Well, thank you so much, Stephen. We should go back and watch some of the awesome sessions from Angular Mix and Angular Connect. Thank you so much for the time!
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We’d like to thank Stephen Fluin again for his time in this interview, and invite you to check out more of what he has to say over at the Angular Blog. To learn more about Infragistics’ support for Angular, check out our Ignite UI for Angular page and ICYMI- here are part one of the conversation, and part two of the chat.