Key skills to look for when hiring Angular devs

Angular is a popular front-end web development framework for building complex and highly performant mobile and desktop web apps. Developed by Google, Angular is an open source TypeScript-based web framework used by millions of developers. It’s currently the second most used front-end framework, with over two million weekly downloads via npm. All kinds of websites currently use it, including YouTube, Upwork, PayPal, and Cloudflare.

Because of its popularity, there’s currently a huge demand for Angular developers. In this guide, you’ll learn about the key skills you should look for when hiring Angular developers.

What is Angular?

Angular is a web framework for creating single-page applications (SPAs) and progressive web apps (PWAs). It’s ideal for large-scale web applications since it’s a full-featured platform with all the necessary components and tools to build an enterprise-grade web app.

Angular uses TypeScript, a strongly typed programming language developed by Microsoft that compiles to JavaScript. A key advantage of Angular is that TypeScript’s type safety helps reduce bugs and speeds up development.

Benefits of Angular

As previously stated, Angular is a go-to framework for many developers. It’s loved and trusted for many reasons, including the following:

Improved speed and performance

Angular utilizes many optimization techniques under the hood to ensure your app is fast. It employs concepts such as ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation, lazy loading, and tree shaking. This guarantees that your web app loads fast and performs well in the browser.

Fast development process

Angular is a full-fledged platform with a large set of built-in components, modules, and tools. It’s easy to configure and set up functionality compared to other frameworks, like React and Vue.js, which are bare-bones and lightweight.

Great community and quality documentation

Angular is a well-documented framework. Its site contains thorough documentation for its APIs, as well as tutorials, best practices, and developer guides. The framework also has a large community with helpful members who are always ready to assist with any of your questions.

Readable and testable code

Since Angular is TypeScript-based, it allows for more readable and concise code. It also follows a strict model-view-controller (MVC) architecture and comes with a recommended style guide. All this ensures your code can easily be read and understood by any developer familiar with Angular.

In addition, the framework comes with testing out of the box. It ships with integration to the Jasmine test framework and Klarna test runner, so you can easily set up unit and end-to-end (E2E) tests. It also provides test and mock modules that make testing easy.

More lightweight web applications

Because Angular is an SPA framework, it loads the whole website once and uses JavaScript to handle any page changes without reloading the page. In contrast, in multi-page applications (MPA), the browser has to reload every time you want to navigate to a new page on the same site, incurring network lag each time.

With Angular, your sites load faster and are more lightweight since Angular handles the routing under the hood. This provides for a faster and better user experience.

Efficient problem-solving patterns

Proponents of Angular love that it’s opinionated. It comes out of the box with problem-solving patterns that solve performance bottlenecks and improve code quality. Angular itself follows the MVC pattern, but it also implements the factory method pattern, dependency Injection pattern, singleton pattern, command pattern, and lazy pattern. All these patterns help keep your web apps maintainable, testable, and scalable.

Key skills to look out for in Angular Developers

Because Angular is a comprehensive framework, finding a good Angular developer might seem daunting. Following are some essential skills a good candidate should have:

Understanding of JavaScript ES6

JavaScript ES6 or ECMAScript 6 is a new version of JavaScript that launched in 2015. It introduces new features to JavaScript, including constants, arrow functions, classes, default parameters, template literals, module imports, and promises.

ES6 features are widely supported by top browsers and aid JavaScript with handy features for modern web development. ES6 is quickly becoming the standard way of writing JavaScript, so understanding it and its features is a must for any web developer.

Good understanding of directives, templates, and dependency injection

Directives, templates, and dependency injection are core concepts in Angular development. These concepts are the building blocks of the Angular framework and are essential concepts any Angular developer should understand.

Angular templates are fragments of the user interface (UI) and are written in HTML and Angular-specific syntax, like directives, that alter the DOM to render dynamic content on the UI. Directives are classes that add behavior to your elements. Common directives are `ngIf`, `ngFor`, `ngClass`, and `ngStyle`.

Dependency injection is a design pattern used to decouple Angular apps. It helps by creating service and module dependencies for parts of the app that need them while keeping the module independent.

Experience with TypeScript

TypeScript is a strongly typed superset of JavaScript. It provides additional JavaScript features that help build web apps faster and with fewer errors.

The ideal hire must be familiar with TypeScript and its features because it’s the language used to write Angular apps. These features include interfaces, type checking, namespaces, and modules. Additionally, Angular developers need to be familiar with the TypeScript compiler and how to use it to build TypeScript files to JavaScript.

Experience with reactive programming (RxJS)

Reactive programming (RxJS) is a programming paradigm in which real-time data updates are propagated through a system using asynchronous and non-blocking concepts.

Angular uses reactive programming extensively through the RxJS library. A good Angular developer needs to have a working knowledge of reactive programming to effectively handle data updates in your web app.

Understanding of API integration

Since Angular developers are frontend developers, they usually have to integrate with backend APIs. This makes API integration a crucial skill.

Developers must be familiar with REST and how to integrate with its standard methods, such as GET, POST, PUT, UPDATE, and DELETE. It’s also beneficial for developers to understand SOAP and GraphQL, as these are common alternatives to RESTful APIs.

Familiarity with responsive designs

Responsive design refers to designing and developing websites that look good across different screen sizes, including mobile and desktop.

A great Angular developer is well-versed in responsive design and can produce websites that look good on every device, whether mobile, tablet, or desktop.

Versioning tools

Versioning tools are programs that allow you to manage and track changes to code over time. They are especially useful for software developed by large agile teams, as they help track changes across iterations and individuals.

Versioning tools are a must in this day and age of iterative and collaborative programming. Good Angular developers are proficient in versioning tools, including Git, Apache Subversion (SVN), and Mercurial SCM.

Ideally, an Angular developer should also be familiar with repository management tools, such as GitLab, GitHub, and BitBucket, for remote code management.

Business, communication, and remote tools

As remote work is becoming more prominent, it’s vital that a good Angular developer also possess efficient business and remote work skills. Ideally, the developers should be self-motivated and punctual, requiring little to no supervision in order to carry out their day-to-day duties.

Above and beyond technical skills, a good developer needs to be a great communicator. Your ideal hire needs to work with PMs and technical leads to identify tasks; collaborate with other team members, especially bac-kend developers and designers; communicate their day-to-day tasks; as well as raise any issues they might face. In addition, they need to have a good working knowledge of popular tools used to power remote work, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Google Meet.

Organization and process tracking

Another helpful soft skill for a good developer is great organizational skills. This is usually shown by their proficient use of issue- and process-tracking software, such as Jira, Asana, or ClickUp.

A good developer should maintain timely updates to their backlog as well as up-to-date commits on their version control. It should be easy for key stakeholders to assess the progress and output of the developer.

Last thoughts

In this article, we unpacked what a great Angular developer should have a firm grasp of technical fundamentals as well as significant business and organizational skills. Finding a developer with these skills will be an incredible asset to your company. Ready to hire a best-in-class Angular Developer? Discover talent today.