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Building Bridges

A talk about the Angular Community

@js_dev

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To Start

  • Been here for 25 hours
  • Learned some Dutch!!!!!!
    • Stroopwafel
    • Geen Verse Stroopwafels - No Fresh Stroopwaffles
    • Fietsongeval - Bicycle Accident

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About Me

Started in QA

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About Me

  • 4 kids
  • 11 years
  • 1 dog

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About Me

  • Legacy Backbone
  • Angular
  • Lodash
  • d3
  • custom OOCSS
  • Single Page App
  • 150K Lines of JS
  • domo.com/careers

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About Me

ng-conf organizer

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About Me

Podcasts

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Let’s Get Started

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JavaScript is Huge

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It’s like Orbital Clearing

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It’s like Orbital Clearing

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It’s like Orbital Clearing

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Clearing the JS Orbit

  • Each Problem Solved
  • Each rough-edge smoothed
  • Each upgrade makes the path a bit more cleaner
  • As time passes, JS gets stronger

  • As time passes, JS community members clear the path for the next round of developers

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Bridge Builder

by Will Allen Dromgoole

An old man going a lone highway,

Came, at the evening cold and gray,

To a chasm vast and deep and wide.

Through which was flowing a sullen tide

The old man crossed in the twilight dim,

The sullen stream had no fear for him;

But he turned when safe on the other side

And built a bridge to span the tide.

“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,

“You are wasting your strength with building here;

Your journey will end with the ending day,

You never again will pass this way;

You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide,

Why build this bridge at evening tide?”

The builder lifted his old gray head;

“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,

“There followed after me to-day

A youth whose feet must pass this way.

This chasm that has been as naught to me

To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;

He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;

Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!”

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Bridge Builder

So what happened?

  • Old man is traveling
  • He crosses river-like space
  • Stops his journey
  • Builds a bridge for a less experience youth

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Bridge Builder

  • Misko - Angular
  • Yehuda Katz - Ember
  • Ryan Dahl - Node
  • Brendan Eich - TC39
  • Jake Archibald - ServiceWorkers
  • SO MANY MORE!!!!!!!!!!

Who are our Old Men?

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Bridge Builder

How many cross without stopping to build bridges?

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Bridge Builder

  • Less experience/understanding
  • Could we have built Angular?
  • Did we need a bridge builder?

They build the bridge for “younger” developers

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Bridge Builder

  • Teachers
  • Co-workers
  • Parents
  • Community Members
  • Strangers?

Take a moment. Think whose bridges you crossed.

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Bridge Builder

  • Community College
    • Learned Java
  • QA
    • Learned C#

Whose bridges did Frost cross?

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Bridge Builder

  • Competitions for Browser Extensions
    • Incidentally learned jQuery
    • Mind-blown
    • So much easier to understand than others
    • Why did they teach me this first?
    • So much easier to get going. Just need a browser.

Whose bridges did Frost cross?

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Bridge Builder

  • User Groups
    • Utah JavaScript User Group
    • Hundreds of these meetups around the globe
    • Over 130 ng-conf extended groups, 25 countries

Whose bridges did Frost cross?

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Bridge Builder

  • Stackoverflow
    • JavaScript is #1 on SO and Github
    • Find answers all hours of the day
    • Still don’t understand why people answer the questions
    • No money + Free Answers = #EvilGenius

Whose bridges did Frost cross?

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Bridge Builder

  • JS Community Blows Me Away!!!
    • The kindness
    • Open Source inherent with JS leads to developers being willing to share

Whose bridges did Frost cross?

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Bridge Builder

BUT WE ARE STILL JUST A BUNCH OF WIERDOS!!!

Whose bridges did Frost cross?

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Building Bridges

BB = Community Building

BB = Fellowship

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Building Bridges

The Angular team is a great example

Brad and Igor are so good at this

GDE Summit, Angular Team was the best

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Building Bridges

  1. Helpful and Useful
  2. Personal and Responsible
  3. Positive or Constructive
  4. Open. Honest. Humble. No Fakes. No Rumors.
  5. Inclusive and Empathetic

http://goo.gl/p7BoeV

Your words have great effect! Plan for what you want the effect to be.

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Building Bridges

Igor’s dedication to the community is unwavering

His involvement w/ ng-conf

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Building Bridges

Are We Bridge Builders?

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Building Bridges

  • Stackoverflow answer?
  • Blog posts?
  • Conference Presentation?
  • Update Documentation? (Jared Williams)
  • Organize Conference?
  • Open Source Project?
  • How do we leave the mark to help the next person?

How big are the bridges that we build?

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Building Bridges

  • Are we thankful?
    • Even for projects we don’t use?
      • Ember?
  • Do we complain or help?
    • Batarang Blunder

Are we the youth for whom the bridge was built?

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Building Bridges

  • Bridge builders, BUILD!
  • Bridge crossers, BE GRATEFUL and LEARN

  • Don’t be the Bridge Troll. Do you part!

Know your role in the community, and fill it!

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Copyright Infringement

John Carmack

John Romero

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Copyright Infringement

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Copyright Infringement

  • Escaped broken homes at a young age
  • Found peace in video games and code
  • Series of events, meet at SoftDisk in Lousianna
  • Would go on to build:
    • Wolfenstein 3D, Quakes, Dooms, more
    • Half-Life, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, more
  • Such a big deal, laws were created around their games

The John’s

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Copyright Infringement

  • Adaptive Tile Refresh
  • Ray Casting
  • Binary Space Partitioning
  • Surface Caching
  • Carmack’s Reverse
  • MegaTexture

John Carmack - The Engine Builder

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Copyright Infringement

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Copyright Infringement

“The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.”

John Carmack - The Engine Builder

John Carmack - The Bridge Builder

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My Challenge to All

  • Don’t be passive, explicitly affect change
  • Don’t watch, get involved, leave your mark
  • Angular doesn’t make community special
    • The community determines that (the bridge builders)
  • Go Build Bridges!

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Thank You!

@js_dev