This week I attended ng-conf for the first time. Last year I tried to get tickets in the lottery but ended up watching online with most everyone else. Of course, I rewatched several of the sessions several times trying to drain every drop of knowledge from these presenters.

This year I took up egghead.io on their "buy a workshop ticket and you can buy a conference ticket instead of trying to get a lottery ticket" offer. Seriously, that was only way I was going to get a conference ticket. I'm not lucky enough to win the ng-conf ticket lottery (or the Google I/O (soon!) lottery or the WWDC ticket lottery).

The conference was held in Salt Lake City at the Grand American Hotel, an impressively nice place to hold a conference. If you have the money and want to visit SLC, this is the place.

The Angular 2 Workshop

The egghead.io Angular 2 workshop, lead by a clean-shaven John Lindquist, was a good experience. I had two sets of goals when I bought my ticket: either to learn a lot during the workshop, or to spend time before the workshop learning as much as possible about Angular 2 and use the event as a measure of what I'd correctly learned. Luckily, I had spent a great deal of time becoming acquainted with the new version beforehand, and felt like I was on the mark with most of the content in the workshop. Good on me.

Catching Up with Friends

Another bit of luck was that Chris Griffith offered to share his room with me (Super Thanks, Christopher!). Chris was accepted as a speaker this year speaking on Ionic 2 during the conference's Fair Day. While eating dinner with Terence Carrol, he asked us how we first met and how we started working together on various projects. It took me a while to realize that Chris and I first worked together on the 360Flex conference application built with Flex and AIR. That was a long time ago.

I also got to spend some time with a few folks on the Ionic team. I am looking forward to getting to know them better over the next year.

Sessions

There were some great sessions on Wednesday and Friday. So great, honestly, I'm going to need to rewatch most of them because all the information was hurting my brain. I think this tweet really tells you about where my head is at now that I am home:

So Much More to Say

In the upcoming week I'll try to talk about all of these things and more. I had a great time at ng-conf, and now I need to decompress and recover before applying things I learned to projects I have in mind.