Blog

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.

The guide to making remote work work

Remote work has been a hot topic in the tech community for decades. While in the late 90s and early 2000s, relatively few people were actually doing it and there were quite some limitations to overcome to make it work at all, today in 2020, remote work is well possible in many industries and even the norm for many companies already. And of course, the global pandemic that forced everyone to work from home gave remote work an extra push. In this guide, we will share some techniques to make a remote working model actually work well for everyone and not just something we all have to cope with because an international crisis struck.

Calling all tech founders: we are seeking startups for pro-bono product design!

We want to give back to our community by sharing our knowledge and expertise with a founder from an underrepresented diversity group in tech, so they can successfully grow and evolve their digital product.

Bringing the Matrix Protocol to Elixir

Matrix is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted, real-time, open standard communication protocol designed to protect people's privacy. The technology has applications not only in messaging and Voice over IP (VoIP) but similarly in Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR).

Simpler and more powerful components in Ember Octane with Glimmer Components

Following up on Bringing clarity to templates through Ember Octane, we will be discussing how the Glimmer components introduced by the Ember Octane edition aim to modernize and simplify Ember applications by using native JavaScript syntax and an HTML-first approach.

Testing your Mirage.js setup

Mirage.js is a universal library to mock out HTTP-based APIs. It has proven quite useful to us in several client projects, where it helped us write a lot of acceptance tests in a concise, but flexible manner.

The issue with tools like this is that you are not testing "the real API" though. This is where end-to-end tests are useful, but since those kinds of tests are quite slow and complex it would be quite costly to use them for all the kinds of tests in a modern web application.

One solution to some of the challenges of using a mock API is to test it and make sure it matches what you would expect from your real API. In this blog post we will show you how we started writing tests for our Mirage.js setup and why it might be useful for you too.

The True Cost Of A Quickfix

Picture this, a sprint is underway, development is running smoothly, then QA reports a rather odd bug, you begin to investigate and lo and behold you find the following comment:

// Dear programmer:
// When I wrote this code, only god and I knew how it worked
// Now, only god knows