So... today I had another meetup event at the SpotDesk office in NYC, It was somewhat rough, although overall I was happy with how it turned out. I think in general everyone was at a much more beginner level than I was expecting. We live and we learn, and hopefully down the line we still remember what we learn. I'm writing this blog post to help me remember what I've learned.
Yeoman and Scaffolding
This is a little warning to all programming teachers- it's tough to teach yeoman in a classroom. First of all, it's a command line utility, and not everyone is comfortable using the command line. You'll get windows users (the trick is to right click cmd and choose "run as administrator") and people who have no idea what they are doing. On top of that, everyone is going to be running npm install at around the same time, and 10+ people doing this at once can really be a drag on the bandwidth. In general, it might be easier to just throw a starter project up on github and just have them run "git clone jims-project rather than trying to make scaffolding a part of the workshop. The only thing is that I love the Gulp-Angular generator so much, and I just wanted them to share in my love for it. Oh well...
Angular Experience
I know I have the problem of thinking that everyone else thinks like I do. As I learn new things I become interested in the more and more obscure, advanced topics in Angular. I'm thinking about those things and excited try to explain them, but sometimes people don't even have a solid grasp of Angular basics. Even worse, some people don't even have a good grasp of JavaScript basics! It's true; some people were so overwhelmed that they just packed up and left after about 30 minutes. It makes me wonder- should I have put on the meetup page that it's not for beginners? Should I have dumbed down the workshop handout a little bit so they could have a chance to follow along? It's a tough call, and although I know you can't please everyone I would really like to... well... please everyone. haha.
Angular TDD Workshops
I created these two pages that are supposed to walk you through two different workshops where you follow a test-first style and create some angular application. Well, this seemed to go way over everyone's head, and I basically ended up doing the fizzbuzz example up in front of everyone.
I am still very proud of these workshops, and I hope one day I'll have a student that finishes one of them (maybe I'll bring it to the next ng-conf or something if I'm invited. Lol). It's important to note who your audience is and tailor your presentation to them. I felt like my talk was aimed at a slightly more knowledgable audience, although these people that did show up must have learned a lot. they had a lot thrown at them- yeoman, gulp, npm, unit testing, jasmine, protractor, angular... It can be pretty overwhelming for a newbie.
Provide Good Solutions
I had some embarrassing moments today. For one thing, I couldn't remember in Jasmine syntax how to check that something was a certain data type. I went onto my github page where the solutions were (supposed to be) hosted, and they were like half finished solutions. What the heck! If you are going to have a meetup event and give out a workshop handout promising that there are solutions online, please made them good solutions. This is something I will definitely fix for the next time I give this workshop, and that's all I want to say on this topic.
Where to Go From Here
Aaron, the other co-organizer of the AngularJS meetup and owner of the Spotdesk office space wants me to do a beginner Angular course. Although I think that could be sort of fun, I feel like I just don't have the time for it. I don't want to make some half-assed course. If I'm going to do it I'm going to do it right. The problem is that I find that stuff boring now, I want to work on interesting unit testing of services with 7 dependencies and harder stuff like that. the problem is that I feel like I'm the only one. No one else is even talking about unit testing in JavaScript. But in some ways that's a good thing. It gives me an opening, and opportunity to fill a missing gap. I want to be known as Jim Lynch, god of unit testing and master of all things Angular. I'm not there yet, not even close, but I feel that talking to others and teaching others in a way helps solidify the concepts for me even further. It gives me a purpose as well to push myself even harder. When it's 1am and I'm still reading stack overflow posts I know that it's not just me selfishly trying to become the greatest developer to ever live for my own benefit, it's also so that I can be the best instructor I can possibly be because I owe it to my students. I like standing up in front of people and talking about Angular, and especially automated testing. It's rewarding. It's fun, but damn is it tiring and just mentally draining! haha.
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