Learning

Have you ever talked to someone that was very passionate about something? It is easy to see that their passion drives a lot of their actions and decisions. The ability to satisfy this desire can play a large role in a person’s overall well being. Unfortunately, most of us are faced with finding time among everything else in their life to pursue this labor of love.

My passion is learning. I love to learn things. I love to learn about lots of different things. To combat the finite time we have have I decided to try to engineer a better learning strategy.

A good portion of what I am seeking to learn is based on the demands of my career. It seems that with each day, the software industry doubles the speed at which it moves. A quick glance on twitter or hacker news can leave even seasoned developers with a feeling of imposter syndrome.

Though much of this post will focus on the quest for technical knowledge, I must state that it is important to expose yourself to a wider variety of subjects. By broadening your horizons, you allow yourself the room to gain different perspectives than you initially may have. This is how new ideas are conceived.

Here is how I go about learning:

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Help designers find AngularJS directive templates

Just a quickie here.

At Envoc, its not uncommon for designers to jump on a project to add some visual love to an app. However, if they have not been on the project for a while, knowing what directives do what and where they are located can be a pain. So to help alleviate this, I decided to take a quick stab at using http-interceptors to add a comment to the template when it is requested.

Producing the following:

2014-10-23 07_56_39-Plunker

Tips for using AngularJS in ASP.Net MVC

At Envoc I live in the .Net world and I personally find developing in Visual Studio quite nice (Web Essentials and Resharper take it to the next level). I am currently helping move a lot of our front-end work into the AngularJS realm and decided to share some of the things that might make the .Net developers life a little better.

Application Inception

While Angular is a framework for the modern Single Page App, I have found that a lot of our MVC applications call for a collection of these “ng-apps”. In this instance they typically don’t include the client side routing.

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Keeping Angular “service” list data in sync with controllers.

Learning Angular has been one of the greatest productivity boosts for rapid application development in my career. However, some of the common strategies implemented can be improved in my opinion.

In AngularJS, there is a great deal of importance placed on separation of concerns. One of the most practiced patterns for holding application state is move this data into angular services or factories. Which one of the former to use is totally a personal preference in my opinion (I opt for factories most of the time).

The purpose of this post is aimed at services that hold collections that update from remote data calls.

Targeted AngularJS version at time of writing: 1.2.19

Too many times, I have run across angular controllers bringing in the $scope service just to $watch a service collection:

The bad:

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