Here’s a chance to hone your Angular skills without leaving the office

You’ve gotta be a little crazy to write software training courses.

So says Ken Rimple, Chariot Solutions’ longtime head of training and mentoring services — and someone who will admit to a little bit of madness. 

Take that one time, at the SpringOne Platform conference, when he found out that SpringOne was no longer going to support Spring Roo (Spring Roo being the open source developer tool Rimple had just spent the last two years of his life writing a book about).

“All my hair fell out,” Rimple said.

At least he has a sense of humor about it.

A few years later, after Rimple had finished writing a training course for AngularJS, Google announced that it planned to completely rewrite and re-release the JavaScript framework under the name Angular, while also continuing to maintain AngularJS. Cue all Rimple’s hair falling out, again.

“The problem,” Rimple wrote in an email, “was that enterprises had NO EARTHLY IDEA WHAT TO CHOOSE, since they didn’t know whether Google would finish Angular (the next generation) and also whether they’d eventually pull the plug on AngularJS. It was a gamble. Luckily Angular is released, and gaining steam. Some development teams are staying on 1.x. So I’m teaching and having to maintain both courses. It’s soooo fun :)”

(It took two years for Google to release Angular, which Rimple says is a pretty long time for this kind of thing. “Sometimes in business you have to play the long game,” he said, “but this was the longest game I ever played.”)

Because of that experience, Rimple is an Angular expert. We got him on board for some office hours to answer any questions you might have about Angular. We’ll be doing it on Thursday, July 27, from 1:30–3:30 p.m. on our public Slack. Drop in at any time during those two hours to ask Rimple about topics like the strengths and weaknesses of Angular, if it’s the right framework for your project and if he’ll continue to torture himself writing training material.

Not on our public Slack?

Get an invite

Tech is ephemeral. Rimple knows this. So why even take the risk of writing these training materials if you know it could change in any moment?

Rimple loves teaching. When he’s not writing courses with his colleague Andrea OK Wright, he spends his days teaching those courses to Chariot clients, as well as acting as a mentor to developer apprentices (like Temple dropout-turned-dev Becca Refford). Writing courses, as he puts it, is a necessary evil, if you want to have full control of what and how you’re teaching. Then there’s the challenge of always learning something new and figuring out how to put it into words

“Even at the ripe old age of 48 I am constantly learning and showing others how to use technologies,” he wrote.

During the office hours session, you can also ask him about some of the music projects he’s built, like this synthesizer or this drumming game, both of which he built with Angular. He’s presented these projects at events like SXSW, Angular conference NG-Conf and Chariot’s Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise. It’s Rimple’s way of bringing some life to technical topics — a drummer since he was a kid, he’s found that it’s easier to connect with people over something that he loves instead of a straightforward tech talk.

I’ll be facilitating the discussion, so if you can’t make it but have a question, drop it in the comments, send it to me on Twitter or Slack DM or email me at juliana@technical.ly. See you there.