SoCreate Launches ‘Lunch Meet’ Team-Led Learning Series

Remember, there’s always another way.

It’s the last bullet on our list of SoCreate company values, but certainly not least. The SoCreate team is made up of lifelong learners, and we constantly strive to find new, better ways of doing things. We’re baking that value into our newest office initiative: Lunch Meet.

Lunch Meet is a monthly series where we meet for lunch (but not necessarily lunch meat 😊) to show and tell what we’ve recently learned in hopes that it provides value to the rest of the team. The event also gives us all a chance to get together as a group and socialize, since every team member is invited to attend, no matter the department. And any team member can present, whether it’s an informal discussion or a prepared slide deck. Software Engineering Intern Timothy Stoddard kicked things off for us in February with his presentation on Angular, a structural framework for dynamic web apps that we use here at SoCreate!

“The presentation gives a solid understanding of the main building blocks of Angular to those who are new to the framework, “ Tim said.
“Namely, those are Components, Directives, Pipes, Services, and NgModules. Components each contain a template for a certain part of the app, directives are used to modify DOM elements, pipes transform data in the template, services give the components functionality, and NgModules allow us to bundle the app into sections of related components.”

Tim used a graphic of a house to help illustrate this Angular architecture. You can see the graphic metaphor in the full presentation here.

Tim brought it home by connecting his presentation back to SoCreate and our best practices for using Angular.

“Specifically, I discussed our strategy for unsubscribing from observables to avoid memory leaks, our choice to use reactive forms instead of template-driven ones, and our practice of using route resolvers to load data before initializing a routed component that relies on that data.”

Big thanks to Tim for the work he put in to make our inaugural Lunch Meet a big success (we even had non-employees attend!). Stay tuned for learnings from our March Lunch Meet, “My Journey to Home Automation,” presented by our Chief Engineer Jami Lurock.

Until then, keep learning my friends!