Blog

Inside simplabs #1: Chris Manson, Senior Software-Engineer

In the first episode of the new series "Inside simplabs", Emma Dell'Acqua, Marketing Assistant, has a chat with Chris Manson, one of our Senior Software-Engineers.

Effective infrastructure for efficient development workflows

Building software products of any kind is hard enough. Doing so without the support of powerful infrastructure that enables efficient workflows is even harder. Yet, many teams are suffering from the absence of such infrastructure, forcing them into very much inefficient workflows with substantial time and effort going into synchronizing the work of different engineers, tracking down bugs, and getting back to tasks later that were already thought to be complete.

How to create an interface inventory

Are you struggling with a messy interface? Is your digital product full of inconsistencies? Are your designers and developers having a hard time aligning on how to evolve your UI?

If so, consider creating an interface inventory. It is a small but powerful step towards a homogenous, pattern-based digital design strategy.

Git Good - The magic of keeping a clean Git history

This post is designed to help you form a solid mental model while working with Git both professionally and in an open source project, and how to ensure you are following best practices to make the process easier for everyone.

Trying your GitHub Actions locally

If, like me, configuring GitHub Actions is not your thing and you find yourself wanting to try something before actually pushing it to GitHub (and having to see the effects on real-life), follow this step by step of how to run your GitHub Actions on your own computer.

Ember.js in 2021 – a beacon of productivity

Ember has been around since the early days of the frontend renaissance that already started several years ago by now. It's almost a decade old and dates back well before React, Vue, Svelte and all the others. The framework has never been on the forefront of the frontend hype train but quietly enabled teams to ship steadily and sustainably – among them Qonto and CLARK, two of Europe's Top 50 FinTechs in 2020 (more on their success with Ember below).

In this post, I want to make the case for Ember in 2021 and explain why I consider it a beacon of productivity in the middle of a roaring sea of complexity. While everyone is obsessed with change and innovation (often mistaking the former for the latter), Ember allows teams to excel at executing their product vision and focus on shipping instead of getting lost in low-level rabbit holes where little business value is to be found.

An intro to animating with the Web Animations API

Animations can be a useful tool to enhance the user experience on the web. Aside from providing an appealing visual experience, animations can aid in the user's understanding of elements appearing, moving and disappearing from a page. This blog post will provide a short overview of the status quo of animating the web and take an initial look at the current capabilities of the Web Animations API.

XML parsing in Rust

Last week we spent some time researching the current state of XML parsing and writing in the Rust ecosystem. For a small side project we needed to read an XML file and turn its content into regular Rust structs. This blog post is a summary of what approaches we looked into, their tradeoffs and what we finally decided to use.

Building prototypes with Ember.js

Have you ever been in charge of creating click dummies, interactive demos or that thing that is made from static images and enriched with hotspots, page transitions and states?

Reaching for Invision or Marvel or the built-in features in Figma, Sketch or Adobe XD is your obvious choice. About 90% into the project you realize you need something in the demo which can't be done in the tool you chose. You hit the same wall I did a while ago.

I was looking for alternative solutions and while Framer does provide many possibilities, I wished there was a different tool which would sit closer to the apps we write for our clients. Dummies are a helpful tool to explore new ideas inside an existing product after all.

Given our client apps are written in Ember.js this was bound to be a new addon for the Ember community. Allowing you to create prototypes, while using little code, but with the full power of the Ember.js ecosystem whenever you need it, thus making it easier to explore new ideas no matter if you start from scratch or want to improve on an existing prject.