Empowering Angular Developers by Connecting Them
In this blog post, Zack De Rose (a software Engineer at Nrwl_io) reveals how Nrwl Connect was conceived and what we have in the works for the future of our developer empowerment platform.
The Magic of Software
Let’s set the tone by quoting Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson’s RailsConf 2019 keynote, a video that recently circulated through Nrwl’s internal Slack channel:
“Look at the way we talk about the freeloader problem in the open source world. We commonly reach for the Tragedy of the Commons to explain why licences, contracts, and the sense of explicit debt obligations are necessary... I believe this is a complete conceptual misappropriation for open source software development..., one that has done great harm to our understanding of what we do as open source software writers. The magic of software is that there is virtually no marginal cost. That’s the economic reality that allowed Gates used to build his Microsoft empire! And what enabled Stalman to give away his free software albeit with strings attached. There is no practical sparsity to worry about.”
Find the full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bQ1p8P2qHM; which is a very fitting boot-legged recording of the talk; given its content!
At Nrwl, we’ve committed ourselves to actualizing all the advantage of this “Magic of Software” - as DHH so elegantly puts it.
Open Source is core to who we are at Nrwl. Our open-source projects, Nx and Angular Console, are testaments to this.
These projects and the value we’ve received from sharing these projects with the community - as well as the value we see the community receiving in return - is a demonstration of our belief that given our craft as software engineers, we’re in a special position to impact the world around us; starting with our own community.
By building Nx, we enable fortune 500 companies, businesses around the globe, and intrepid start-ups alike to have first-class tooling for sharing code across their projects and managing their mono-repos.
By building Angular Console, we give expert developers and new-comers alike a tool to visualize the Angular Command Line Interface (CLI). The Angular Console improves the usability of all the features that the Angular CLI supports, as well as improving the discoverability of plugins that empower the CLI to support the broader JS ecosystem a la frameworks like Express, NestJS, and React!
Introducing the next Chapter in our Legacy: Nrwl Connect
Nrwl Connect is a developer-enhancement platform that we originally built in order to share knowledge with our support clients, since we began to see common motifs and problems that we’ve solved for one client that other clients would also encounter.
In keeping with our tradition of Open Source, and in extension of our core identity - believing in the power of “The Magic of Software” (and it’s not-so-distant-cousin: “The Magic of Knowledge”) - we think that we’ve built something here with a great potential for the larger dev community, and we want to give it away for free as a way of empowering that community. So as of May 2019now, we’ve opened the doors of Nrwl Connect with all our content freely available to anyone for the price of an email!
That means each of these full-length published books are yours to read free of cost.
That means these Live Broadcasts (and upcoming events, including our upcoming broadcast with Alex Eagle on Bazel!) are yours free of cost.
That means all of our custom-written solutions to difficult problems are yours free of cost.
What the Future Holds
Our Nrwl Connect product is still very young. We think we have put something out there that is valuable and worth your time, but we still have farther to go in terms of building out the platform to fully meet all the needs of our fellow engineers. We’ll need more features and content to get to that point.
As we did with our Open Source projects, rather than keeping the platform under wraps or limited to our clients, we have opened this platform up to the public in its early state so that we could see real users getting experience with the platform. We hope this will show us how we can truly help other engineers through this platform, and will let their experience and input drive the platform to where it needs to go.
Join Us
If you have any intersect with our tech stack, join us on this journey by creating an account and giving us feedback!
What topics do you struggle with? Which of these are addressed by the content on our platform? Which are not? Do you have a unique perspective or use-case you’ve encountered with your experience that you can contribute to the community? Is there a feature missing from our platform that you want to see? We want to hear about all of it!
Work With Us
Finally, if you want to work for a company that shares your passion for Open Source and the Dev Community, and you have experience working with React or Angular or Node, and if the prospect of solving the difficult problems of our Fortune 500 clients and then harnessing that experience to give it back to the wider community excites you as much as it does us; then we want to bring you on board so we can work together to make this dream a reality!
Check out our careers page. Now let’s go build a better future together.
Onward to adventure!
