Panel:

• Charles Max Wood
• John Papa
• Ward Bell

Special Guests: Ilya Bodrov & Roman Kutanov

In this episode, the Adventures in Angular panel talks with Ilya and Roman. Ilya is a professor, writer, and developer. Roman is a cofounder, and a CEO, of a small startup company. Roman is making an application for small businesses, and he also was a CEO of a Russian startup, too. Check-out today’s episode where the panel talks to the guests about Angular, their startup companies, Test Cafe, among others.

Show Topics:

1:20 – Guests’ backgrounds.

2:31 – Chuck: Let’s talk about Angular. In your opinion why is it a good option for startups?

2:55 – Guest: Angular is a very good choice.

3:55 – Guest: If you are not familiar with these concepts or a seasoned developer then it can be difficult and complex to get started. It really depends on what you are trying to build.

4:47 – Chuck: Once you get rolling with it then you run into limitations with it. If you need something simple and fast it’s really nice.

5:08 – Guest: Yes. Trying to find your market niche. Angular is very simple to transfer. Angular has a great community. There are some problems, and we know it. Like the whole mess with versions also...

6:27 – John: Can you elaborate a little?

6:34 – Guest: Yes, if you want to be in the latest technologies...so sometimes you get into a situation when you wan to have some libraries installed and you cannot do that. If you are on one version and this one isn’t supported, then it was a huge mess.

7:43 – Guest adds in more comments.

8:26 – Guest: Currently I have Angular 1. It is too complicated to rewrite.

8:40 – Guest adds comments.

8:57 – John: There would have to be a compelling reason for me to go to Angular 6 at this point. Going from 4 to 5 or 5 to 6 – the one feature – boy that is so amazing. To have it to update your app, and update your code then that’s awesome. If you didn’t know that a command changed then you were in trouble. I agree version control has always been a challenge.

10:20 – Guest: What I like about Angular is the community – it drives it in the right direction. They try to make it more productive and that’s what I like.

10:43 – Chuck: What is it like to run a startup?

10:56 – Guest: I started to write the application. What you see is what you get. I use Angular 1. JavaScript is a heavier language.

14:54 – Guest adds comments.

16:02 – Panelist: What kind of server are you using for your startup?

16:19 – Guest: I have Angular 1 as a backhand. The main application right now is...

17:11 – Panelist: What has the experience been like for people?

17:26 – Guest: Yes...

17:32 – Panelist: What were the benefits of using Angular?

17:40 – Guest: Angular was very helpful. The performance is much better. Important for startups is to know how to write functionality.

18:53 – Panelist: What forms were you using?

19:01 – Guest: Template driven. In Angular 1, I created “what you see is what you get.”

19:52 – Panelist: I am torn about forms. The Reactive side but you move a lot of code that doesn’t feel all that intuitive to me. There are pros and cons of each, but it’s not exactly where I want it to be. I would love to mix the 2 together. Have you dealt with validation in the forms?

21:04 – Digital Ocean’s Advertisement.

21:41 – Guest: I have an editor. I send it to the client. Each input is having some sort of validation.

23:17 – Panelist: How do you make them look good? Yeah, I can do it but how does it not look generic? Do you have a layout?

23:53 – Guest: I throw it into the screen – I try to keep it simple.

25:04 – Panelist: That makes sense. I didn’t know if there was a crossover of complexity. I want a balance between...

25:38 – Panelist: Reactive or Template driven?

25:45 – Guest makes comments. You want to have some custom checking.

26:13 – Panelist: Why was it hard?

26:21 – Guest: Not sure...I experimented a lot.

27:27 – Panelist: I gave up on Reactive. One of the killers for me was the nested components. It seemed to fall apart in my hands. It was extremely difficult. The outer form lost contact to what was going on. That was one of the biggest decisions to walk away from Reactive all together.

28:25 – Guest: Now I remember why I dropped templates.

28:44 – Panelist: Not true, but it’s doable! It’s also easy! You have to know what’s going on. Let’s change the story on this – I don’t want to hijack the podcast.

30:55 – Panelist: It makes your ears stand up. John’s objection was that he was putting a lot of stuff into HTML.

32:43 – Panelist: Every time I see some try to decorate the HTLM – no you don’t have to do that. The rules aren’t there. There are exceptions, of course, but real validation is not screen validation. Interestingly, we have written one for this application. It belongs to Marcel. This isn’t Breeze specific – maybe we an get people to working on it. For sure, even if you didn’t have this framework, you can create one on your own. It turns out that it has more models than you think it does.

34:55 – Panelist: Aside from forms, what mattered in your app?

35:22 – Guest answers the question.

36:01 – Panelist: Lazy Loading. In some apps lazy loading doesn’t make sense in all areas. You don’t always have to use.

36:53 – Guest: Yes, when you work for your employer you sometimes have more time available. When you have a startup it’s a race. Your startup doesn’t have any money.

37:24 – Panelist: You had money?

37:33 – Guest: You have to try new things and makes things right. When users really start really using your application. You can fix everything and make the perfect app or you can learn new things about your users. What problems do that have?

38:50 – Panelist: Question asked.

39:40 – Guest answers question. 

40:38 – Protractor.

41:51 – Problems that you/we ran into.

42:21 – Panelist: “We” are using Test Cafe.

42:58 – Cypress.

44:10 – You do not need web driver and...

44:29 – Test Cafe is free.

44:39 – I would pay ten’s of dollars to use a piece of software. It’s a budget buster.

45:15 – Sounds like you guys have a great product there.

45:24 – Thanks for having us.

45:30 – Chuck: Let’s go to picks!

45:39 – Code Badges!

46:13 – Picks!

Links:

• Microsoft’s Azure
• JavaScript
• Ruby
• Angular
• Test Cafe
• Cypress
• Ilya’s GitHub
• Ilya’s SitePoint
• Ilya’s Twitter
• Roman’s Crunchbase
• Roman’s LinkedIn
• Roman’s Twitter

Sponsors:

• Angular Boot Camp
• Digital Ocean
• Get a Coder Job course

Picks:

Charles

• Microsoft Ignite
• Microsoft Connect
• Follow me on Twitter!
• Apple Event

John

• Pipelines – Azure
• VS Code

Ward

• Test Cafe

Ilya

• Framework Event

Roman

• Michael Seibel’s Building Product
• MLcourse.AI – October 1st next session starts – it’s free

Special Guests: Ilya Bodrov and Roman Kutanov.