Blog

The little changes that helped to transform an RFC into emberjs.com

The new landing page for Ember.js is a big project.

In 2018 there was an RFC for updating the website. Which was a great thing, but there was just a mockup for the desktop website and a few of the interactive states. No version for small screens, no layout grid or repeatable measures.

So besides development, there was the task of converting this initial design mockup into a full-featured design system with elements and components that can be reused across the large Ember.js universe for which the landing page is only the doorway.

This post highlights some of the changes I proposed and which made it to the final website.

How to over-engineer a static page

When we set out to rebuild our own website simplabs.com in 2019, we wanted to use that project as an opportunity to ignore all economic considerations (and reason you could say) and dive deep into what was technically possible. Doing so would allow us to build something that was super customized for our specific needs and highly optimized for performance. We ended up spending a lot of time and effort but are quite pleased with the result.

While we cannot recommend anyone following our example as your time is most likely better spent elsewhere, this post explains the approach we took. I will be covering topics like static pre-rendering and client-side rehydration, advanced bundling and caching strategies as well as service workers.

Bringing clarity to templates through Ember Octane

When reading Ember templates, have you ever wondered where a certain dynamic value comes from? Is that dynamic value a property of the component, a named argument that was passed in, or even a helper?

In this blog post we will be discussing how recent Ember.js modernization efforts on the path to Ember Octane have brought features that help with this exact problem.

Why Companies Invest In Open-Source and Why Yours Should, Too

Less productivity, missed project deadlines and wasted money: that’s what you get for letting your developers work on open-source projects. Or do you really?

This blog post highlights on which levels contribution to open-source provides value to businesses and demonstrates why paying your team to spend time on OSS might be the best business decision you will make this year.

simplabs monthly update - July 2019

Welcome to the fourth installment of our monthly update. This one is later than expected but still packed with all the events and activities that have been happening at simplabs along with the things we're looking forward to. Enjoy.

Sentry error reporting for Ember.js

Are you confident that your apps have no bugs? Do you not need a support team because no user ever complains about something not working? Then this post is not for you!

We use a lot of tools at simplabs to ensure reasonably high quality code, but occasionally something slips through. The important thing then is to notice and fix it quickly. This post will focus on the "notice" part by using Sentry error reporting in Ember.js apps.

simplabs monthly update - May 2019

Welcome to the third installment of our monthly update. Each month we cover the events and activities that have been happening at simplabs along with the things we're looking forward to. Enjoy.

Automated dependency updates for your internal GitLab server️

Are your dependencies hopelessly outdated? Would you need to hire another developer just to keep up with the maintenance work of keeping them up-to-date? If those questions match your project then this blog post is for you. Keep reading and we will show you how to solve a lot of these issues with some easy to use tools.

simplabs monthly update - April 2019

Welcome to the second installment of our monthly update. Each month we cover the events and activities that have been happening at simplabs along with the things we're looking forward to. Enjoy.

SPAs, PWAs and SSR

Single Page Apps, Progressive Web Apps and classic Server side rendered websites are often seen as orthogonal approaches to building web apps where only one is best suited for a particular project and one has to make a choice to go with one of them. In this post we'll explore why that doesn't have to be the case, since all 3 approaches can actually be combined in order to achieve the best result.