Acodemy – Workshops in AngularJS and Web Components

Some time ago, when I was looking for a solid improvement of my workflow and knowledge, it was hard to do it on my own. A good idea if you are in a similar position as I was in are workshops. They are just a perfect place to interact with more experienced developers, talk to them and build your own project under their watchful eyes.

In February 2015, 10Clouds organized the 3rd edition of Acodemy – Workshops where we try to share our knowledge with other developers. This edition focused on AngularJS for people who have basic knowledge and want to ‘go deeper’, talk about code habits and discuss AngularJS functionalities. In the second part of Acodemy we concentrated on Web Components & Polymer technologies and we tried to introduce them and adapt to real user scenarios with our tutorial.

The highlight of the workshops was to let the participants build a Spotify-like web app and face real life problems. At the very beginning we had to setup the environment and then we built a simple app with a few AngularJS modules (each module covers another part of the Angular framework):

• Search bar – includes controller and browser address bar manipulation,
• Requests to spotify API are handled by service
• Play music button – directive which communicates with other directives of the same type,
• Tracklist – uses filters and ng-directives in the view,
• Three views – each one shows data for ngRoute,
• $q library – for data fetching from services .

After that, we transformed play button directives into Web Components using all of their specification elements:

• Custom element – creation of our own HTML’s tagname,
• Templates – separated HTML part for easy re-using,
• HTML Import – moved play button html to separated file,
• Shadow DOM – encapsulation for styles and logic of our element.

This gave us a super-duper imported template which is fully independent of external styles with new HTML tag.

Finally, we wrote communication between AngularJS and Web Components using lifecycle methods. For the most ambitious participants, there was also a part of the workshops dedicated to Polymer (mostly based on rewriting Web Component elements to Polymer technique).

What are the advantages of attending workshops? They are a great place to talk about things that you are interested in. Our mentors are real experts and have deep understanding of AngularJS and Web Components. During such workshops you have a chance to work with totally new people, with their own projects and ideas. It’s also a great time to hold a brainstorming session and show other projects or techniques, not only these related to workshops. It’s very easy to expand your horizons! Plus workshops are not only about programming: you have the chance to integrate and get to know new like-minded people and play foosball with them! =)

Why should you join Acodemy?

In our workshops you can learn from real experts – our main target is to expand the knowledge of the attendees. It’s also a great moment to ask about our daily work routine and it can be the first step to start working at 10Clouds.

Soon we will announce new dates for our workshops, where you can practice the above mentioned cases. If you are interested, visit our page, sign up for our newsletter and don’t miss this great opportunity!