Blog

simplabs monthly update - March 2019

Welcome to our new monthly update. Each month we'll cover the events and activities that have been happening at simplabs. Enjoy.

Ember.js: The Documentary - Berlin Screening

Following on from last week's premiere in Amsterdam the new HoneyPot film 'Ember: A Mini Documentary' will be shown in Berlin this evening (2019-02-11).

The film is a deep dive into the world of Ember.js and includes an interview with our CEO Marco Otte-Witte. After the screening Jessica Jordan from simplabs will present 'Everything They Didn't Tell You About the Ember Community' which will be followed by a Q&A.

Ember.js: The Documentary - Amsterdam Premiere

We're very pleased to announce that simplabs are featured in the new HoneyPot film 'Ember: A Mini Documentary' that will premiere in Amsterdam this evening (2019-02-08).

The film is a deep dive into the world of Ember.js and includes an interview with our CEO Marco Otte-Witte. After the screening there will also be a Q&A with Yehuda Katz & Special Guests!

Factories best practices

Writing tests is like drinking beer 🍻. When you first try it, the taste is really quite unpalatable, but everyone else around you is doing it and they seem to be enjoying it. You've heard about all the benefits of it, people won't stop telling you how great it is, how it changed their lives for the better. Also there is a lot of peer pressure and judgement involved, don't be that dev... so you conceal your grimace and keep trying it, on a daily basis here at simplabs. And just like beer, in no time at all, on a long hot day, when you feel yourself tiring of writing all those features and tweaking all that CSS, you realise that what you need to relax is to write a good, concise, logical, cool and refreshing test. At least that's been my experience and I want to share a few tips for factories so that your tests are easy for your friends, colleagues, the next developer to read.

Assert Your Style - Testing CSS in Ember Apps

Sometimes you really want to make sure that your web application looks good; and that it keeps doing so in the future. Automated tests are an important foundation for making your application's appearance future-proof and this may involve the integration of a screenshot-based testing tool like Percy.io or PhantomCSS.

But writing your own visual regression tests for critical styles in your application can be really useful, too - and it can be easily done on top of that!

Open Source Maintenance

People often ask us how we can handle maintaining a large number of open-source projects. In this blog post we will introduce you to some of out internal best practices we have developed or discovered to simplify and speed up working on open-source and other projects.

From SPA to PWA

Progressive Web Apps are the next level of browser based applications. While Single Page Apps (SPAs) have already meant a giant leap forward, PWAs are taking things even one step further. They offer a rich user experience that parallels what users know and expect from native apps and combine that with the benefits that browser based applications provide. In this post, we'll look at how to turn a Single Page App into a Progressive Web App.

Building a PWA with Glimmer.js

We recently set out to build a progressive web app with Glimmer.js. Instead of building it with Ember.js, which is our standard framework of choice, we wanted to see how suitable for prime-time Glimmer.js is and what we'd be able to accomplish with it. To put it short, we are really happy with how building the app went and the result that we were able to achieve. In this series of posts, we will give some insights into how we built the app, why we made particular decisions and what the result looks like.

actix – a basic TCP client

In our last post about actix we introduced you to the Rust programming language and the actix actor framework. This week we will build a basic TCP client with actix.

ember-intl data loading patterns

At simplabs we ❤️ ember-intl and use it for all our projects where translations or other localizations are needed. ember-intl is based on the native Intl APIs that were introduced in all newer browsers a while ago. Unfortunately some users are still using browsers that don't support them and this blog post will show you our preferred way to load the necessary polyfill and the associated data.