Where did ng-conf come from?

Quite a few people have asked me how I became one of the ng-conf organizers. I usually tell them that it was luck. However, in the traditional definition of the word, luck had nothing to do with it. When preparation meets opportunity, that is the luck I am referring to.

"We should go to an Angular conference"

As I sat at my desk one day, after only a few weeks of starting my new job at Domo, I had a simple conversation that would change things for me. When you think about it now, this simple conversation would change things for a lot of people. A few seats away from me sat my friend Kip Lawrence. Kip and I knew each other from the local JavaScript User Group. Kip was the main organizer of the UtahJS group, and there was a time that I was a regular presenter at their monthly meetups, as well as their annual UtahJSConf. As I hammered away at some code (which is another way of saying starred at the screen trying to figure out what was going on), Kip kicked back in his seat and said "Aaron, we should go to an Angular conference." As I am accustomed to depending on other people for great ideas (i've never claimed to be the ideas guy), I immediately judged this idea to be a great idea. We started looking, hoping to quickly narrow in on an Angular conference that would fit us well.

After a few minutes of looking, we realized that there were no such thing as an all-Angular conference. As we realized this, I had no idea that Kip was about to drop another great idea on me, but that didn't stop him from doing it. "We should put on an Angular conference", he said. I still remember him saying that. My immediate reaction was "Oh yeah, of course we should". When in reality the thought of putting on a large developer event had no appeal to me, and I hoped that if I said Yes, and just turned back around, Kip would forget about it. But after I let it soak in for a few seconds, I realized that Kip was right. We needed to do it.

Prior to this time in life, I had only helped organize a small user group, Google Dev Group of Utah. GDG Utah is, to put it bluntly, a user group for programmers that are total Google fanatics. After attending the group for a few years, my friend Gabe Dayley asked me to come help organize the events. Organizing GDG Utah helped me get out of my shell a bit. When I didn't have anyone to present, I had to create a presentation from scratch. I learned a lot from the group. Some time in 2012, I had to admit to myself that I was having an affair with JavaScript. My attention was being drawn from "All Things Google" and wanted to focus more on "All Things JavaScript". This is when I got to meet Kip, and a few other people that will be my friends forever.

Back to the Kip-conversation. After spacing out a bit and having a lightning storm of thoughts around how I was not fit to run an Angular conference, as I was a complete novice myself, I calmed down, gained control of my zoned out eyes, and re-focused them on Kip once again. I told him that in a week's time I would be in San Francisco for Google IO 2013, and that coincidentally I had signed up to go to an after hours party with the Angular team. I told Kip that I would talk to the Angular team and see if we could get them to send one or two of their team members to come to the event. Kip and I knew that if we had two people from their team, we could put on a conference that a lot of people would want to attend.

So, rather than brainstorm and have a solid idea of how the event would go, and have some concrete ideas to give the Angular team, Kip and I left it at that. The only notion of an Angular conference was in our heads. Nothing on papers. No outlines talking-points. Just a hazy vision of a conference that we, two angular novices, would like to attend. The only thing I had to go on, was the name that Kip and I had joked about calling our event: ng-conf.

Things Going For Me

I am being a bit disingenuous. I wasn't completely un-prepared. I knew that I had some things that could help me appeal to the Angular team's better senses. For starters, I was friends with John Lindquist, the most popular Angular evangelist in the community at the time. Another thing that I had going for me was that one of my closest work buddies, Dave Geddes, had a great working relationship with the Angular team, as he had moved their build system from Rake to Grunt. Further, my other friend, Joe Eames, was a PluralSight author, and had recently authored a large Angular training that was quickly gaining success on PluralSight, as well as making Joe a familiar name to the Angular team. Was I going to lean on those relationships in hopes that the Angular team would open up to me? Absolutely! I would simply need to figure out how to pay them back later.

So this that is what I had when I went to talk to the ng-team. An idea of something great, an event name, and some solid friendships that would help get me in.

The After Party

As I arrived at the Google offices in the District area of down town San Francisco, I was wicked nervous. Not only was I about to talk to Brad Green for the first time, I was about to ask him for a huge favor: sending a few of his team members to a small event in Utah. And on top of this, I was 60 minutes late.

I quickly spotted the people that I needed to talk to: Brad Green, Misko Hevery, and Igor Minar. Which one should I talk to first? I had no idea. So, what does a guy like me do when he doesn't know what to do? I ate. After 20 minutes of suffering from immense feelings of inadequacy, I gave in and approached Brad. Any ng-fanboy that has been at an event with these guys will tell you, people flock to them. They are like rockstars. Still, after only a matter of minutes I was face-to-face with Brad. I introduced myself as a friend of John, Dave, and Joe. He was listening.

I am not sure what I said next. I honestly can't remember. All I know is that I was
asking him for a giant favor, and that made me very nervous. However, as with all

things, there are two sides to each story. While I asked Brad for what was, per my
interpretation, a huge favor, he heard something entirely different. What he heard was that I wanted to do him an huge favor. After he explained that I was the one doing him a favor by putting in an Angular event, I honestly thought that this brilliant, brilliant man was confused. How could me asking him for a favor be interpreted as me doing a favor for him?

Because the Angular team is part of the gigantic company that is Google, they don't have the autonomy to do their own giant tech events. However, if someone from the community was willing to run the event themselves, then the Angular team could get highly involved, as the event was not a Google-event (I am mad-paraphrasing here. I hope that no one gives me any lashings for using only a few words to describe the complex arrangement/situation that the Brad explained to me).

For starters, they all loved the name "ng-conf". Within minutes of meeting each other, not only did Brad confirm that he would be involved with ng-conf. He also stated bluntly that he would send his entire team to the event!!! Short of him inviting me to an After-After-Party, I am not sure that the initial discussion with Brad couldn't have gone any better.

As I walked away from that conversation to text Kip, my friend Josh Woodward hung back and chatted for a bit. After I walked away, Josh remembers Brad saying: "I want some of whatever that guys is on", referring to how pumped the conversation had gotten me.

The ng-conf Team

Now that we had a commitment from the Angular team, it now all depended on Kip and I putting together an amazing event. I had told the Angular team that it would be an amazing event. However, if you had asked me then what ng-conf would be like, I would have told you that it would be a low-budget, grass-roots event for 300 developers, with bad food, slow internet, and user-group-like theatrics. Truly I was not prepared to fulfill my commitment to the Angular team. And unless Kip was ready to pull some magic out of his hat, we were going to need some help. And help is exactly what we got.

Because Kip and I worked with Dave Geddes and Joe Eames, and because I had name-dropped them when talking to Brad, we invited them to help organize. Even as they both quickly said "Yes", we still had no idea what the event would inevitably become.

We began organizing, and quickly realized that we were going to need some sexiness, in the shape of a sweet website for the event. It was agreed that we would see if Merrick Christensen would be willing to help us out with the website. I have never asked him, but I doubt that Merrick knew what he was getting into when he agreed to help organize ng-conf. Where we initially asked him to get involved to help with the website, we would later lean on him heavily to add some youthfulness to the event.

And that is how the ng-conf team came together. These four guys and I would spend the next months, from May 2013 until January 2014, preparing one of the most successful conferences that I have ever seen.

Ups and Downs

Planning a major event that will be scrutinized by your peers is a very stressful things to do. However, if you do it well, it can be also a very satisfying thing to do. Now that we are on our second year, there are less downs this time around. However, the first year was no stranger to Ups and Downs. The following was the biggest Up and Down that I experienced in the first year of organizing ng-conf.

Round 1 of Ticket Sales

I still remember that day like it was last month. The day that we started selling tickets to ng-conf had Ups. And Downs. But mostly Ups. In accordance with being total noobs to large-scale-conference organizing, a lot of things were a little off. We held our first round of ticket sales before we had even closed the Call For Proposals. We hadn't done any major marketing either. We had simply put up a marketing site, with a place for people to enter their email address if they wanted updates on the event. We had an email list of about 3000 people. We hoped that by sending emails to the people on our list, we would be able to sell all of our 700 tickets. We had already committed money to the hotel, so if the tickets didn't sell, we would have to figure out how to pay the money to the hotel that we were contractually obligated to pay them. If the Angular community didn't agree that we should have a large all-Angular event, then each of the 5 organizers was going to accrue a significant amount of debt from the hotel contracts.

We had spent dozens of hours talking about the type of conference that we wanted to put on. Rather than do something cheap, we wanted to put on a high-end event. And so that we didn't exclude people due to the price of tickets, we would stream the live event on the internet, for free. That way anyone with a computer and internet connection could be a part of the event.

On the morning of September 16th, 2013, I had a complete meltdown. Thirty minutes before tickets went on sale, I walked up to Dave at his desk and told him that I quit. I didn't want to be a part of the event any more. I was so nervous that the twitter-sphere would crucify us for selling tickets at $600 a head. Even after all the re-assuring that we had done for weeks, and price checking that we had done, I still lost my mind. Lucky for me, I had friends. Dave took me outside to get some air. He called Joe, Merrick and Kip, and we had a last-minute chat about possibly lowering the price of tickets. If we lowered the price of tickets, people would be more likely to attend, and we wouldn't have to all be in huge debt due to no tickets selling. However, we wouldn't be able to provide the high-class event that we had planned. Luckily, Merrick and Joe defused the bomb in my head. With minutes to spare, we walked inside to pull up the ticket site and see if anyone would buy a ticket within the first few minutes of sales opening up.

Our idea was that we would make sure that they started selling fine, and then we would go grab lunch and eat it around Kip's desk, and watch tickets sell one at a time. As soon as the clock struck noon, Kip refreshed the page. Something was wrong! As soon as the clock struck noon, all of the first round tickets appeared as pending. We didn't want them to be pending, we wanted them to be available. Kip immediately opened up the settings on our ticketing site, and tried to change them from Pending to Available. Little did we know that Pending meant that someone was already in the process of purchasing the ticket. In other words, as soon as the clock struck noon, the "Buy" button enabled and those people on the other end had each clicked the button immediately. All of the Round 1 Tickets sold in less time than it took Kip to refresh his browser. After about 5 minutes we realized what had happened. It was an ethereal feeling.

Within minutes I went from a major Down to a major Up. I went from quitting as an ng-conf organizer, to watching all of the tickets immediately disappear. What a day! It was a great feeling. For any of you who have never organized an event, let me tell you: selling all of your tickets in a matter of seconds is only something you hear about in conference myths. It just isn't something that happens.

So What Is ng-conf?

Is ng-conf simply a conference? At certain times in the past, I would have answered Yes. Now that a year has passed since the first event, however, I've had a few experiences, and I think that the answer is No. While I am still not 100% sure what it is, I do know that for some people, it is more than a conference. While the following may sound like bragging, I eventually make a point. I promise.

Shortly after the event in 2014, Alex Maier nominated me as a Google Developer Expert for AngularJS. Even as I insisted that there are many more-qualified Angular developers, I became an Angular GDE in April 2014. That has been a great experience.

Later I was approached by AngularJS Boston and AngularJS Mexico, and asked to come present at their groups. And in a few weeks, I will be traveling to the Netherlands to give a keynote talk at their NG-NL Conference. In the last year, I have had the privilege of each of these experiences, as well as a handful of others. Still, there is one experience that I feel most appropriately uncovers my assertion that ng-conf is more than simply a conference.

While I was in Mexico City for the meetup with their AngularJS group, it was my pleasure to meet dozens of very cool Angular developers from the area. It was a great group, and the people were just some of those people that you don't soon forget. Really great people! Yet, I felt like a complete ass while I was chatting with them after the meetup. The feeling came quickly, and I didn't even see it coming. Just as I have done many times in the past, many of them grabbed a selfie with me. I stood there for selfie after selfie. "If they only knew the truth", I thought. I am just a scrub. If I were them, I would've DEFINITELY left my camera in my pocket. Does it make sense to say that I was flattered and confused at the same time? Flattered for obvious reasons. Confused because: why anyone, besides my wife and kids, would want to snap a pic with me.

The meetup in Mexico City was in the morning. I was lucky enough that, for the remainder of the day, the organizer of the meetup (Josué Gutiérrez) and is fiancé took me out to see the town. While I am no stranger to Mexico City, they took me to a part of the city that I had never seen before, Coyoacán. It was a beautiful part of the city, with a lot of beautiful history and culture. And at the end of the day, we sat at a restaurant and hydrated. It was hot!! And as we sat there, Josué said something to me that set me back. He said "I never thought that I would be sitting here talking to you". You can imagine the look on my face as I tried to grok WTF he was talking about.

He treated me like I mattered. They all did. Everyone at the meetup. And many people at each of these meetups. They treat me like I matter. And now that I have had several months to reflect on this, I think that I kind of understand what is going on. I think that what I represent matters, and because what I represent matters, they treat me like I matter. Each of the ng-conf organizers represents the event when we are out and about. If anything sets me apart in a crowd besides my red beard and my waistline, it's that I organize ng-conf. And ng-conf matters for a lot of people.

Josué told me his story of finding ng-conf. He found out about the event after all of the tickets had sold out for the first conference. But, as he saw the conference site, he says he was inspired. As soon as he saw our site, and what it represented, something clicked for him. He immediately purchased angularjsmexico.com and began his own meetup in Mexico City. And similar to Josué, I think that ng-conf means several different things to a lot of different people.

I am not trying to pin a badge on myself for organizing a great event. Because at the end of the day, I know that people are coming to meet the speakers and hear their talks, as well as network with other Angular community members. I know these things are fact. So again, I am not trying to pin a badge on ng-conf for being something that it isn't. I am merely saying that now I know that it is more than simply a conference. Like it was for Josué, it is an opportunity for people to find their place in this awesome and humongous developer community around AngularJS. It is a chance for people to find inspiration around AngularJS, and then turn those thoughts into action. I know this now. I don't pretend that it is simply an event.

Conclusion

And it is because of this that I am so excited for this years event. ng-conf 2015 is going to be among the greatest JavaScript conferences ever, I have no doubt. The announcements that will take place, the friendships that will be made, and the chance for each attendee to grow. It will be another great event. And just like each of the attendees, and the hundreds (maybe thousands) of people that will be watching on the live stream, I am just happy to be along for the ride.

Update 1: 1/27/2015

Since writing this two of the people involved told me that they remember the story a little differently. Igor and Merrick both told me that they remember the same thing. So let me clarify. A week after the Google IO event, Geddes and I were giving a talk at FluentConf 2013 in San Francisco. Merrick came with us to the event. It was cool to hang with both of them all weekend. Igor came by to see our talk. It was nice because our talk actually involved shocking people using some odd hardware, a Chromeapp, Angular, the WebSpeech API, and the words "um", "so", "like" and "uh". And to prove that we were really shocking each other, we had volunteers. Among those volunteers, we volunteered Igor to come get shocked. It was lots of fun. A very cool talk! Dave is a great guy to present with, for sure.

After that talk, as Igor and Merrick recall, was when Igor committed to ng-conf happening. I remember this as well. Not withholding, for some of us ng-conf was already happening. I just wanted to clarify that we can both be right. It may have become something at different times for different people. For me, it was real a week before Fluent.