06 Mar 2015

1000 Day Love Story With Ember

Like most love stories, my love affair with Ember took time to blossom. I first saw Ember in 2011, had some fun, and planned to look at it once the API solidified.

In that time, pre-1.0, Ember’s API would change constantly. Most people saw this as a flaw, after all, it meant that documentation, blogs, and stack overflow searches would frequently reference older versions. The router saw the biggest changes, frequently.

The benefit of this – Ember got the API right. Once it hit 1.0, the API was on point; and with the correct API in place, Ember keeps getting better. Ember is able to make changes under the hood, applying React style rendering, performance enhancements, and generally get better and better over time.

My experience with ember is generally along the lines of Deleting more code than I add; Ember tends to add what I need overtime and I use that instead of my code.

Told over a series of many (perhaps too many) tweets, here is the story of my transition from Ember to Angular to Ember.

2011

2012

I live-coded some ember at Houston Code Camp and it didn’t go very well. Too many rough edges, mostly with ember-data.

2013

During 2013, JB and I wrote and published AngularJS + Rails. Angular was very pragmatic and got some things done. Others, like directives and services, seemed half-baked.

2014

I read about the community love at EmberConf 2014 and was insta-jealous. I remember what I love about Rails and Ruby was the community; decide to revist Ember in earnest and see how things are rolling along.

I dive into ember-cli; it’s the final piece of the ember puzzle. Followed by ember-addons and quite simply amazing.

2015

Angular announced their 2.0 backward compatibility breakathon apocalypse. I finalize what’s been happening for a year, and break up with Angular for Ember. #sorrynotsorry

EmberConf 2015. Such amazing awesomeness.

Can’t wait to see what happens in 2015 and beyond.

PS. The actual 1000 days is Tue, 09 Sep 2014; I had built my 3rd app by this time. I doubt it’ll take you 1000 days to fall in love. Want to try? Check out the CodeSchool Course, ember-cli, and the ember guides.

PPS: I created this using a combination of t and the twitter archive. (t only returned 3200 tweets in a search).