We have two half days (affectionately known as Freaky Fridays) at work a month, where we get to work on our own projects or explore something new. Yesterday was dedicated to exploring Angular 2.
I thought that it might be a good opportunity to test it out in a real-world application – my Flashcards app to help me learn Swedish vocabulary.
The syntax isn’t too dissimilar from AngularJS, but rather is abstracted in more boilerplate code. Getting a basic app going, by following the Quickstart Guide, wasn’t too difficult.
Then, there was a knock at the door. It was Earl, the Grim Reaper of Over-Engineering. He asked me to remember that I am a software engineer and that everything has to be TIP TOP from build one.
So, the curse kicked in and I started scrambling to get the basic setup working with Webpack. I tried cramming in a Webpack tutorial, alongside the Angular 2 tutorial. Soon, it just became about cursing the day Webpack was built and racing through Stackoverflow, hoping someone else wrote something to make everything PERFECT now.
10 minutes before the end of the day, I realized… wait.
The goal was to learn Angular 2 and use it to build an app.
That’s it.
I told Earl that there was another engineer across the street, about to do something simple. He scurried away.
I gutted out the Webpack configuration and stuck with the lite-server package suggested in the Quickstart guide.
Moral of the story: fuck Earl and fuck over-engineering.
