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About 13 years ago I built a web shop for my dad’s company. Like many small businesses, the company does not have an in-house development or IT department, so anything vaguely website-related tends to end up in my inbox. This is how I recently found myself in a conference call with Dom from IntegriMart1, a company which provides marketing tools for websites. This type of business is known as a “marketing tech” company, sometimes abbreviated to the crap-sounding “martech”, and a close cousin to “adtech”.

I have just converted this website from an AngularJS app backed by the Wordpress REST API to a static HTML site powered by Hugo, a static site generator written in Go. This post explains my reasoning, experiences and thoughts about the results. Back in 2014 I was learning AngularJS, and I decided to build my website with it as a learning exercise. I wrote about it here. I was happy with the design, but there were a number of issues with which I gradually grew dissatisfied.

When we talk about productivity, it is usually in the context of our professional lives. Is this fair? Does productivity begin and end at the office door? I’d like to address this question indirectly, by backing up and taking a high-level look at the subject. No tips or “weird tricks” here; rather some brief thoughts on the scope of productivity. Productivity is happiness. Happiness is the sensation you get when you progress towards a goal.

In software development, we often hear and speak of abstractions. When we use this term, we often mean some variation on concepts such as “hiding the implementation details”, “providing an interface”, “modelling a data type” or even “removing duplicate code”. But what is the essence of abstraction? The origin of "abstract" in the Macmillan Dictionary for Students I was recently looking up the term “abstract” in a dictionary, and was struck with the origin of the word:

Earlier this week I set out to convert a few of my Angular 2 apps to use Ahead-of-time (AoT) compilation. I’ve just been to AngularConnect and heard about a project named “@ngtools/webpack” (video here) which supposedly allows you to use the same build tools that the angular-cli project uses, even if you don’t use the cli (which is the case with my stuff right now). So I eagerly searched out@ngtools/webpack on npm and found this:

SKQW (pronounced “skew”) is a native desktop audio visualization application written in TypeScript with Angular 2, and implemented on the Electron framework. It is currently in alpha and a compiled binary only exists for Windows, but I’m hoping that - if there is interest - I can push the project forward and improve stability, features and of course bring full support to Mac OS X and Linux.

Hi there. You opened an issue with my project on GitHub, and it’s getting kind of stale by now. I am aware of it - GitHub was kind enough to send me an email containing your report, which I scanned one morning a couple of weeks ago while I ate breakfast. I’ve even thought about it briefly a couple of times since then; once I was in the shower and I got the vague idea that I knew what caused it - but I wasn’t sure because I could not recall the specifics.

Want to create a reusable Angular 2 component which can be customized with a user-provided template? I had this use case and could not find any relevant documentation or tutorials, so after a few days digging around the internals on Angular 2, I am sharing the result of my research. This is one way to do this - perhaps there are other, better ways. Feedback is welcome! (TL;DR - working demo on Plunker)

Yesterday I lost several hours to the following error in an Angular 2 app I am working on: Cannot resolve all parameters for 'BaseDataService'(Http, undefined, ODataService). Make sure that all the parameters are decorated with Inject or have valid type annotations and that 'BaseDataService' is decorated with Injectable. The undefined in this case is my redux AppStore service. Other dependencies (Http, ODataService) worked just fine. Even weirder - I was successfully injecting AppStore into several other components without issue.

AngularConnect, the largest Angular conference to date, has just taken place in London. Here is a summary based on what I learned and what I found most interesting. Since it was a two-track event, I only saw half the talks, so for the full picture, watch the sessions yourself on YouTube. Many of you just want a quick rundown on the key points, so the first section of this post is just that - “the meat”, albeit in bite-sized pieces (think pork scratchings or jerky).