How I learned Deep Angular

About me

I am a software engineer graduated in Venezuela, my career focused on math, algorithms and logic not in any language in particular, they though that way I would be able to learn any language I wanted faster and I could join any environment (they were right)

Why I wanted to learn Deep Angular

Well it was required in my current company and I wanted deeply to learn it since I was discovering my love for frontend

How I approached learning Deep Angular

A friend started with the idea (out of boredom) of creating a dashboard generator with angular 4, I though well this is my opportunity to learn Angular the good way (this friend has been an angular developer since the beginning of time so he knows all the way through it) so I coop with him creating this new app.

Challenges I faced

My main challenge was coding up to my friend level, he created the main services and started working with a new client from the company so I was in charge of improving and completing his work even when I knew little about the technology.
First I started by looking and learning by his code, trying to find everything I needed and searching online for docs when I didn't understand. Then I started creating new functionalities and complementing his code, some weeks passed and I created the or change almost everything from the app, to realize that the architecture I finally made was terrible, the code was patched and so poorly done it wasn't going to work, at that time my knowledge of angular and its perks was a lot deeper than when I started, so there was only one way to go....

Destroy everything and start from 0.

When I did that I realized how well was the structure my friend made on the first time, so I took it once more from there, I called him in a meeting and I introduced my new way of how I think the app should look and how to do it to see if he approve it. He did and I started the rework, focusing on this new architecture that even my boss liked it.

Key takeaways

I learned a lot, and I mean a lot just from some code a senior developer did, it was such an amazing experience to see how my vision changed from when I started to when I finished it, the product was so good that my boss is on the process of investment on it.

Tips and advice

I have always though that the tutorials are not that good for learning a new framework a new language, i mean, don't take me wrong tutorials work great as an intro, but you wont learn as much as fighting a real project with real requirements and functionalities.

My advice go for a tutorial, sure, but after it try looking for some senior code of it, a project in github or something you could check out and open it, read it, from top to bottom, that way you wont only learn the framework, you'll learn about architecture and amazing new ways of coding.

Final thoughts and next steps

My next goal, would be, native programing for angular, ios or even some backend or gaming language.