Acodemy.io - AngularJS & WebComponents workshop

Last Saturday I had a chance to join couple of folks from Wroclaw and take part in the AngularJS+WebComponents workshop. The whole event has been run by the 10Clouds(http://10clouds.com) - interesting IT company from Warsaw which specializes in modern solutions (made mainly using JavaScript, Php and Python).

I have had a chance to work with AngularJS and that’s why I was more interested in WebComponents part of the workshop. I have done some reading before the workshop on WebComponents, so I had a bit of understanding what these beasts are, but I have never created one myself :)

What I liked about the event is that I get much better understanding of the WebComponents. I haven’t had a chace to use them before. I was not sure what the difference between WebComponents and Polymer library was. Right now I know, that the aim of Polymer is to make using WebComponents a bit easier. Unfortunately, from the talks I had with some of the devs who already done some effort and used WebComponents I realized that Polymer is not yet ready to be used in production environment. Polymer still has no stable version, but its API has been greatly changed, and many breaking changes have been introduced some time ago. So for myself, the take-way was: WebComponents are definitely the future of web development (front-end), but at the moment Polymer is not ready to be used in production quality applications.

I think that the event was very well prepared. We have started with pure AngularJS application (let’s say it was a Spotify clone) and then slowly made some improvements/changes to it. It was very interesting to see how WebComponents could be used from withing AngularJS application. Some steps were quite complicated, and that was the moment when asking the mentor about help was the best decision.

The great thing about the event was that the company did not hide its aim: become better known in Wrocław, as they are about to expand their local office (at the time of writing it, the employed only ~3 devs in Wrocław). They way they approached their goal was awesome: no posters all over the town, no “conference” (usually such events are not of high quality) - but organizing something that is a huge challenge, an event that participants can benefit a lot from. Personally, I think this is the very best way to attract people to start working for a newly settled down company.

The other great thing was that there was a possibility to talk to couple of developers already working for 10Clouds (they were mentoring groups during the event). So if anyone had any question in regards how the company works, what kind of project do they usually work on, what is their approch to forming teams, how do they organize their work in terms of the methodology - all these (and many more) questions could be easily answered either during the meeting or during the after party.

10Clouds - thank you for making it all happen!