My Angular Journey - Why I choose Angular over React?

My Angular Journey - Why I choose Angular over React?

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This article is a task from Anna J McDougall on Hashnode Technical Writing Bootcamp II. I am writing on the topic of "Technology itself". It also has talked about my Angular Journey.

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With all the existing frameworks and libraries, the web frontend development tech stack is extremely rich and multifaceted. Choosing a tried and true tool, such as Angular, might seem like a good idea. But there are more options to consider if you are building a specific type of product.

React, one of the fastest-growing and most popular frontend libraries has been steadily gaining traction among developers, as well as business owners. Due to a number of its benefits, it has soon become the go-to web development tool. There is no doubt that React is a big name when it comes to choosing Front End Frameworks (Some prefer to say it's a library).

There is a huge community out there who love and support react. A relatively young framework, it has taken the web development world by storm. Created initially as an internal tool by Facebook engineers, the framework soon went open source, which allowed it to further grow and become widely adopted among individual developers.

Instead of all these above benefits, I have chosen ANGULAR.

One of the major and personal reasons why I have chosen Angular is provided at the end of the article.

My decision of choosing Angular goes back to October last year. I was working on a project that required the conversion of a WordPress theme into a Bootstrap theme. And usually happens with projects, the client used to tell us every now and then about new requirements, due to which we had to integrate a lot of custom design to the site. (Since, the company was only 2 years old. There was no Requirement Elicitation or any development methodology.)

It would involve a lot of development where we used to develop a section from some different site and other sections from another reference site. I used to hand-code many of the things which were not possible through Bootstrap. To implement the changes meant a lot of custom coding with Vanilla CSS and JS. As with any other developer, I used to get stuck implementing those changes, where I didn't know what to do next. I used to search Stack Overflow or Google things around which led me to get introduced to topics that I didn't know before like CSS Flexbox or Grid, Arrow functions in JS etc.

I started suffering from Imposter syndrome. For many weeks, I used to think I don't know much about the development and I needed to perfect in CSS and JS. At that time, I wasn't that active in the tech trends going on in the industry. I didn't have an account on Twitter. Neither I used to follow any dev channels on YouTube. While going through that project, I definitely felt the urge to upgrade my skills. So after a bit of research, I started following the Dev Channels on YouTube like Traversy Media, Academind, Net Ninja, etc. (These are few names, I used to follow around 15-16 channels . 2 channels were related to web design).

Then, I started learning JS and CSS from Udemy Courses. I used to read a lot of medium articles related to JS. And used to search on Google for CSS Tasks and Challenges like 100 days of CSS, Daily CSS Images. I then learned about the Front End frameworks and decided to pick one.

I read a whole bunch of articles and watched a whole lot of videos about which one to choose between Angular/React/Vue. Although, most suggested to start with React. And it was tempting to choose to React as the first pick. I decided to go with Angular.

I don't want the article to get long and boring (I will write in detail about my learning journey in another article in the future). The reason to go with Angular was that while researching I had got to know through videos and articles that Angular has a very steeper learning curve and many people find it very hard to learn(as compared to React or Vue). That's the point that clicked me. I thought if I could learn this, then I can prove to myself that I can learn anything in the world and get over with the Imposter Syndrome.

I have successfully learned Angular and made several personal projects using Angular and Firebase. My Portfilio is currently built using Angular, Bulma, and Firebase. If you visit my portfolio, do send me a message using the Say Hello button. I would be more than happy to read it.