Kilted Code

I want to start a series of shorter blog posts, the for now I’m going to call Code Bytes. Obviously a cheesy play on words, but I like cheesy. And bacon, but I digress. The idea is they’ll be shorter posts that are a quick read of limited scope. At least some of the first I have ideas aren’t even enough to warrant a Github repo for examples. They’ll be good with just some in post code examples. It’s a little something new I’m trying out this year, so we’ll see how it goes. For our first Code Byte, we turn to the Angular CLI.

Conferences are great places to learn new technologies, network with your peers, and even make some friends. For me, they are also a great place to share my knowledge, when I’m given the opportunity. There is a great conference coming up in October that I’m very excited to be selected to speak at: AngularMix.

I currently work in an environment leveraging Docker. This has made me a huge fan of containers, no matter who you use. In learning Docker, I’ve also found my own tips and tricks I use. I previously shared with you my experience running two Angular apps side by side in a Docker container with NGINX. That was my first step really diving into Docker. For our full system, we have everything set up with a docker-compose file, configuring all the containers and dependencies we need making it easy to setup, update, and run a full environment. From this, I’ve found several commands to make it really easy to manage and clean up after myself.

We all have dreams. We just don’t all go sharing those dreams with every thug and ruffians we meet at the local watering hole, even if it is a five star joint. Sometimes, we keep those touchy-feely dreams to ourselves. For those private dream[app]s, we need authentication. One of the popular and easy ways to add authentication is through JSON Web Token (JWT).

Angular manages unsubscribing from certain observable subscriptions like the HTTP service or the async pipe. However, it doesn’t clean up them all. The rest are up to you. RxJS is powerful and provides you several ways to handle your observables.

I recently gave a talk at DevFest DC. This conference is one of my favorite every year, because of the amazing speakers and fantastic value for your money (but more on that in another post). This year, I gave a talk on Angular that had a two fold purpose. The first was to act as an introduction to Angular. The second was to dispell some of the misconceptions about what Angular is and isn’t. This is my attempt to put a form of it into a blog.

This year, I gave a talk on Angular at DevFest DC that had a two fold purpose. The first was to act as an introduction to Angular. The second was to dispell some of the misconceptions about what Angular is and isn’t. Translating the talk to a blog yielded something a wee bit too long. So I’ve split the “What is Angular?” portion of code snippets here.

I am super excited to announce I will be speaking again this year at DevFest DC (May 5 - 6). This is one of my favorite conferences to attend and speak at. It is a fantastic conference that started several year ago as one of many Google Developer Groups (GDG) held DevFests all on the same day. The then small conference has now grown into a fantastic two day conference with some amazing speakers and workshops at an amazing price. The conference every year always been great for Android, Web and Cloud technologies sessions (as it is put on by the GDG). This year will be the first spring offering of DevFest DC and will also be bringing Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, IoT and Deep Learning to the lineup.

One of the cool things in Angular is the use of Observables for the APIs. There are quite a bit of benefits of this (which is for a future post) but one of which is the ability to cancel the request. This ability makes Observables ideal for searches to happen as you type. The official Angular Tour of Heroes tutorial gives a good example under part 6, when implementing the hero search functionality. That’s actually what I based this idea and work on.

In the latest project I’ve been working on at work, we’re taking a new approach to deployment. We’re using Docker containers for everything, which for our team is something new but useful. We plan to deploy to the cloud (provider not solidified at this time) so it makes it easy to spin up more instances when your pieces are already in containers. It is also great for our test team, who can now simple grab the Docker images and run their own containers wherever and however they need. We already have Jenkins set up to build the images nightly and on demand, as well as then push them to our own Artifactory, so that process is fairly smooth. This post is not about our decision to use Docker (the good, the bad, or the ugly). This is about my experience figuring out how to make a Docker container for the UI code, an Angular app (version 2+).