Demystifying the Push / Pull nature of Angular Signals
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Angular Signals are THE HYPE at the moment and for a very good reason!
The promise of new better officially sanctioned way to manage state in our Angular applications is something we have been waiting for since the first Angular release!
Throw in improved DX, better ergonomics and signal based inputs and even the most skeptical developers will agree that Angular team is onto something objectively better and amazing!
But as with everything new, there is going to be transitory period and a bit of friction while getting acquainted with the new APIs and developing new mental models of how signals work in practice!
A teaser
It all started with a little Twitter Angular Signals Quiz…
Even though most folks called the correct answer in the replies, there was definitely a bit of uncertainty about how and why exactly is zero the correct answer as we’re obviously updating the value of the source signal multiple times…
A new piece of puzzle
Signals are definitely reminiscent of the revolution caused by the introduction of RxJs based APIs back in the day when Angular (2) was first released.
One of the thing that helped me the most when first learning about RxJs was this diagram from the official RxJs documentation!
It helped me to organize my scattered implicit know-how about “how things work” with just a couple of clean cut concepts and their combinations.
Rewinding back to present, this approach proved to be very helpful when wrapping my head around the new Angular signals and their sometimes not so…
