Angular

Free Angular Training during JavaScript Marathon with This Dot Labs

Published Mar 26, 2020

Updated Feb 14, 2023

4 min read

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

Now that we're all working from home, This Dot Labs has something planned to keep you tied up - online Angular training!

In celebration of our new remote, corporate training offerings, This Dot invites you to enjoy six weeks of free, live Angular courses!

This is just one of the five weekly sessions we're hosting on topics, including Vue, React, RxJS, and Web Performance!

You can sign up for other courses and find the full schedule at JavaScriptMarathon.com.

Enjoy 6 free Angular courses, given LIVE every Wednesday the entire month of April! Sign up below.

April 1, 2020: 1 Hour to Learn Angular

This is an introduction to Angular. We will walk through what the Angular CLI is, and how it can help us. We’ll explore a newly created Angular application, as well as data binding (interpolation, attribute vs property bindings, class bindings), and components using input and outputs. We will introduce a service to fetch async data as well as a custom pipe to render data differently from the underlying model. We will do this using the Angular CLI to show the participants how much is done for them. Last but not least, we will add some custom CSS to ensure everything looks as pretty as possible.

April 8, 2020: The Best Pro Tips for A11Y in Angular

In this training you’ll learn how to make your Angular applications more accessible. We’ll teach you what NOT to do, and provide you with some best practice tips on what to do to ensure accessibility compliance.

April 15, 2020: Master PWA in Angular

In this training, you will learn how easy it is to convert your Angular application into a PWA with just one command. We’ll also dive into the files generated by the Angular CLI that make your application a PWA, and help you better understand what Angular is doing under the hood.

April, 22, 2020: Advanced NgRx: Complex Angular State Management

State management libraries like NgRx can be simple to learn, but difficult to master. Managed correctly, NgRx can be a powerful tool for isolating complexity and separating concerns, greatly speeding up development, and reducing errors. However, when applied incorrectly, NgRx can overwhelm your team and actually worsen errors. Luckily, there are a handful of tips that can help you, and your team, reach state management bliss. In this training, we’ll discuss event-based actions, event storming, how to write more resilient effects, how to determine what data belongs in your store, how to build more maintainable selectors and components, and how to identify when your team is heading down the wrong path. NOTE: This training expects that attendees already know the basics of the NgRx architecture (selectors, reducers, actions, and effects)

April 29, 2020: Easy Angular Unit Testing in NgRx

NgRx is awesome, but testing can be a complex job. We’ll cover some of the common patterns to test NgRx’s reducers, selectors, effects as well as components that are using those selectors and actions. We will also cover a bit of marble testing as well to help you along in your testing journey.

May 6, 2020: A Guide to Advanced Angular Patterns (Route Guards, Pipes, Interceptors, and more)

It’s easy to write websites and applications in Angular using mostly basic components, services, and the built-in Angular tools (such as pipes). But, there’s a lot more you can do in Angular to build your own utilities, and extend the Angular platform! In this training, we’ll learn how to take full advantage of the Angular platform. We’ll explain and build sample route guards, pipes, interceptors, and directives. Along the way, we’ll call out some common pitfalls that trip up teams as they start to build their own utilities.

You can RSVP to attend any of these amazing events, hosted by talented team members at This Dot Labs, by clicking on the hyperlinks above! If you have any questions, or want to learn more about the JavaScript Marathon series, visit javascriptmarathon.com, or email us at hi@thisdot.co.

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

About the author(s)

This Dot

Incremental Hydration in Angular

Incremental Hydration in Angular Some time ago, I wrote a post about SSR finally becoming a first-class citizen in Angular. It turns out that the Angular team really treats SSR as a priority, and they have been working tirelessly to make SSR even better. As the previous blog post mentioned, full-page hydration was launched in Angular 16 and made stable in Angular 17, providing a great way to improve your Core Web Vitals. Another feature aimed to help you improve your INP and other Core Web Vitals was introduced in Angular 17: deferrable views. Using the @defer blocks allows you to reduce the initial bundle size and defer the loading of heavy components based on certain triggers, such as the section entering the viewport. Then, in September 2024, the smart folks at Angular figured out that they could build upon those two features, allowing you to mark parts of your application to be server-rendered dehydrated and then hydrate them incrementally when needed - hence incremental hydration. I’m sure you know what hydration is. In short, the server sends fully formed HTML to the client, ensuring that the user sees meaningful content as quickly as possible and once JavaScript is loaded on the client side, the framework will reconcile the rendered DOM with component logic, event handlers, and state - effectively hydrating the server-rendered content. But what exactly does "dehydrated" mean, you might ask? Here's what will happen when you mark a part of your application to be incrementally hydrated: 1. Server-Side Rendering (SSR): The content marked for incremental hydration is rendered on the server. 2. Skipped During Client-Side Bootstrapping: The dehydrated content is not initially hydrated or bootstrapped on the client, reducing initial load time. 3. Dehydrated State: The code for the dehydrated components is excluded from the initial client-side bundle, optimizing performance. 4. Hydration Triggers: The application listens for specified hydration conditions (e.g., on interaction, on viewport), defined with a hydrate trigger in the @defer block. 5. On-Demand Hydration: Once the hydration conditions are met, Angular downloads the necessary code and hydrates the components, allowing them to become interactive without layout shifts. How to Use Incremental Hydration Thanks to Mark Thompson, who recently hosted a feature showcase on incremental hydration, we can show some code. The first step is to enable incremental hydration in your Angular application's appConfig using the provideClientHydration provider function: ` Then, you can mark the components you want to be incrementally hydrated using the @defer block with a hydrate trigger: ` And that's it! You now have a component that will be server-rendered dehydrated and hydrated incrementally when it becomes visible to the user. But what if you want to hydrate the component on interaction or some other trigger? Or maybe you don't want to hydrate the component at all? The same triggers already supported in @defer blocks are available for hydration: - idle: Hydrate once the browser reaches an idle state. - viewport: Hydrate once the component enters the viewport. - interaction: Hydrate once the user interacts with the component through click or keydown triggers. - hover: Hydrate once the user hovers over the component. - immediate: Hydrate immediately when the component is rendered. - timer: Hydrate after a specified time delay. - when: Hydrate when a provided conditional expression is met. And on top of that, there's a new trigger available for hydration: - never: When used, the component will remain static and not hydrated. The never trigger is handy when you want to exclude a component from hydration altogether, making it a completely static part of the page. Personally, I'm very excited about this feature and can't wait to try it out. How about you?...

Mar 14, 2025

3 mins

AngularJavaScript

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use Dialogs are a common component added to applications, whether on the web or in native applications. Traditionally there has not been a standard way of implementing these on the web, resulting in many ad-hoc implementations that don’t act consistently across different web applications. Often, commonly expected features are missing from dialogs due to the complexity of implementing them. However, web browsers now offer a standard dialog element. Why use the dialog element? The native dialog element streamlines the implementation of dialogs, modals, and other kinds of non-modal dialogs. It does this by implementing many of the features needed by dialogs for you that are already baked into the browser. This is helpful as it reduces the burden on the developer when making their applications accessible by ensuring that user expectations concerning interaction are met, and it can also potentially simplify the implementation of dialogs in general. Basic usage Adding a dialog using the new tag can be achieved with just a few lines of code. ` However, adding the dialog alone won’t do anything to the page. It will show up only once you call the .showModal() method against it. ` Then if you want to close it you can call the .close() method on the dialog, or press the escape key to close it, just like most other modals work. Also, note how a backdrop appears that darkens the rest of the page and prevents you from interacting with it. Neat! Accessibility and focus management Correctly handling focus is important when making your web applications accessible to all users. Typically you have to move the current focus to the active dialog when showing them, but with the dialog element that’s done for you. By default, the focus will be set on the first focusable element in the dialog. You can optionally change which element receives focus first by setting the autofocus attribute on the element you want the focus to start on, as seen in the previous example where that attribute was added to the close element. Using the .showModal() method to open the dialog also implicitly adds the dialog ARIA role to the dialog element. This helps screen readers understand that a modal has appeared and the screen so it can act accordingly. Adding forms to dialogs Forms can also be added to dialogs, and there’s even a special method value for them. If you add a element with the method set to dialog then the form will have some different behaviors that differ from the standard get and post form methods. First off, no external HTTP request will be made with this new method. What will happen instead is that when the form gets submitted, the returnValue property on the form element will be set to the value of the submit button in the form. So given this example form: ` The form element with the example-form id will have its returnValue set to Submit. In addition to that, the dialog will close immediately after the submit event is done being handled, though not before automatic form validation is done. If this fails then the invalid event will be emitted. You may have already noticed one caveat to all of this. You might not want the form to close automatically when the submit handler is done running. If you perform an asynchronous request with an API or server you may want to wait for a response and show any errors that occur before dismissing the dialog. In this case, you can call event.preventDefault() in the submit event listener like so: ` Once your desired response comes back from the server, you can close it manually by using the .close() method on the dialog. Enhancing the backdrop The backdrop behind the dialog is a mostly translucent gray background by default. However, that backdrop is fully customizable using the ::backdrop pseudo-element. With it, you can set a background-color to any value you want, including gradients, images, etc. You may also want to make clicking the backdrop dismiss the modal, as this is a commonly implemented feature of them. By default, the <dialog> element doesn’t do this for us. There are a couple of changes that we can make to the dialog to get this working. First, an event listener is needed so that we know when the user clicks away from the dialog. ` Alone this event listener looks strange. It appears to dismiss the dialog whenever the dialog is clicked, not the backdrop. That’s the opposite of what we want to do. Unfortunately, you cannot listen for a click event on the backdrop as it is considered to be part of the dialog itself. Adding this event listener by itself will effectively make clicking anywhere on the page dismiss the dialog. To correct for this we need to wrap the contents of the dialog content with another element that will effectively mask the dialog and receive the click instead. A simple element can do! ` Even this isn’t perfect though as the contents of the div may have elements with margins in them that will push the div down, resulting in clicks close to the edges of the dialog to dismiss it. This can be resolved by adding a couple of styles the the wrapping div that will make the margin stay contained within the wrapper element. The dialog element itself also has some default padding that will exacerbate this issue. ` The wrapping div can be made into an inline-block element to contain the margin, and by moving the padding from the parent dialog to the wrapper, clicks made in the padded portions of the dialog will now interact with the wrapper element instead ensuring it won’t be dismissed. Conclusion Using the dialog element offers significant advantages for creating dialogs and modals by simplifying implementation with reasonable default behavior, enhancing accessibility for users that need assistive technologies such as screen readers by using automatic ARIA role assignment, tailored support for form elements, and flexible styling options....

Oct 25, 2024

4 mins

HTMLJavaScript

Announcing October JavaScript Marathon - Free, online training!

Join us October 28th, 2020 for our next JavaScript Marathon! JavaScript Marathon is a full day of free, online courses on React, TypeScript, GraphQL, and more. Come learn about some of the leading web development technologies, and concepts! Stay for one training, or stick around for the whole day! No two sessions will be the same! --- React Hooks 201 *Featuring Kyle Hill @ 11:00am - 12:00pm EDT* It might have taken a little while, but: have you mastered the use of useState, and maybe even (mostly) understand what useEffect is doing at this point? Cool. Let’s level up our React Hooks skills further by diving into some of the other tools in our box. We’ll leverage useContext and useReducer to create an easy to implement interaction and data flow that scales along with your application and your team. --- Getting Started with Eleventy *Featuring Kyle Mitofsky @ 12:30pm - 1:30pm EDT* Eleventy is a JavaScript based Static Site Generator (SSG) that's designed around performance, accessibility, and simplicity. Take your first steps to build out front end designs, websites, and content with this walk through that'll get you set up on your first eleventy site. Learn some of the basics with some patterns and best practices as well. --- TypeScript for Beginners *Featuring Dacey Nolan @ 2:00pm - 3:00pm EDT* During this introduction to TypeScript, we will cover what TypeScript is, what benefits it provides, and how you can use it in your projects. Code with me or just follow along as we dive into each of the types and learn how to use them. --- Automating GraphQL Client Code Generation *Featuring Kevin Wolf @ 3:30pm - 4:30pm EDT* In this talk, we will learn how to streamline Front End Development by generating type-safe GraphQL Operations for Apollo Client. --- Building GraphQL Resolvers *Featuring Josh Oppenheim @ 5:00pm - 6:00pm EDT* Have you ever wanted to know how graphql resolvers work or why we use them? In this training we will talk about the philosophy behind resolvers and how they fit in the greater GraphQL flow. We will take a look at how the graphql-js library implements them and we will write some of our own. We will discuss some possible requests from consumers and write resolvers to accommodate the needs presented. --- Need private trainings for your company? If you would like to learn more about how you can leverage This Dot’s expertise to upskill your team, and reinvigorate your developers with new knowledge about the web’s leading development technologies, visit the trainings page....

Sep 23, 2020

2 mins

EnterpriseGeneralJavaScriptTraining

“We were seen as amplifiers, not collaborators,” Ashley Willis, Sr. Director of Developer Relations at GitHub, on How DevRel has Changed, Open Source, and Holding Space as a Leader

Ashley Willis has seen Developer Relations evolve from being on the sidelines of the tech team to having a seat at the strategy table. In her ten years in the space, she’s done more than give great conference talks or build community—she’s helped shape what the DevRel role looks like for software providers. Now as the Senior Director of Developer Relations at GitHub, Ashley is focused on building spaces where developers feel heard, seen, and supported. > “A decade ago, we were seen as amplifiers, not collaborators,” she says. “Now we’re influencing product roadmaps and shaping developer experience end to end.” DevRel Has Changed For Ashley, the biggest shift hasn’t been the work itself—but how it’s understood. > “The work is still outward-facing, but it’s backed by real strategic weight,” she explains. “We’re showing up in research calls and incident reviews, not just keynotes.” That shift matters, but it’s not the finish line. Ashley is still pushing for change when it comes to burnout, representation, and sustainable metrics that go beyond conference ROI. > “We’re no longer fighting to be taken seriously. That’s a win. But there’s more work to do.” Talking Less as a Leader When we asked what the best advice Ashley ever received, she shared an early lesson she received from a mentor: “Your presence should create safety, not pressure.” > “It reframed how I saw my role,” she says. “Not as the one with answers, but the one who holds the space.” Ashley knows what it’s like to be in rooms where it’s hard to speak up. She leads with that memory in mind, and by listening more than talking, normalizing breaks, and creating environments where others can lead too. > “Leadership is emotional labor. It’s not about being in control. It’s about making it safe for others to lead, too.” Scaling More Than Just Tech Having worked inside high-growth companies, Ashley knows firsthand: scaling tech is one thing. Scaling trust is another. > “Tech will break. Roadmaps will shift. But if there’s trust between product and engineering, between company and community—you can adapt.” And she’s learned not to fall for premature optimization. Scale what you have. Don’t over-design for problems you don’t have yet. Free Open Source Isn’t Free There’s one myth Ashley is eager to debunk: that open source is “free.” > “Open source isn’t free labor. It’s labor that’s freely given,” she says. “And it includes more than just code. There’s documentation, moderation, mentoring, emotional care. None of it is effortless.” Open source runs on human energy. And when we treat contributors like an infinite resource, we risk burning them out, and breaking the ecosystem we all rely on. > “We talk a lot about open source as the foundation of innovation. But we rarely talk about sustaining the people who maintain that foundation.” Burnout is Not Admirable Early in her career, Ashley wore burnout like a badge of honor. She doesn’t anymore. > “Burnout doesn’t prove commitment,” she says. “It just dulls your spark.” Now, she treats rest as productive. And she’s learned that clarity is kindness—especially when giving feedback. > “I thought being liked was the same as being kind. It’s not. Kindness is honesty with empathy.” The Most Underrated GitHub Feature? Ashley’s pick: personal instructions in GitHub Copilot. Most users don’t realize they can shape how Copilot writes, like its tone, assumptions, and context awareness. Her own instructions are specific: empathetic, plainspoken, technical without being condescending. For Ashley, that helps reduce cognitive load and makes the tool feel more human. > “Most people skip over this setting. But it’s one of the best ways to make Copilot more useful—and more humane.” Connect with Ashley Willis She has been building better systems for over a decade. Whether it’s shaping Copilot UX, creating safer teams, or speaking truth about the labor behind open source, she’s doing the quiet work that drives sustainable change. Follow Ashley on BlueSky to learn more about her work, her maker projects, and the small things that keep her grounded in a fast-moving industry. Sticker Illustration by Jacob Ashley....

Apr 18, 2025

3 mins

Engineering LeadershipGitHub

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Free Angular Training during JavaScript Marathon with This Dot Labs

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Let's innovate together!

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Incremental Hydration in Angular

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use

Announcing October JavaScript Marathon - Free, online training!

“We were seen as amplifiers, not collaborators,” Ashley Willis, Sr. Director of Developer Relations at GitHub, on How DevRel has Changed, Open Source, and Holding Space as a Leader