ef4's Dev Blog

Fun Fast Tools for Serious Work

This post serves as a permalink to accompany my talk from EmberConf 2021. MhoThe demo of the service-worker-based build tool is available here with instructions to run both the prebuilt

Videos

Dynamic import() into your Ember app

A screencast where we build an app that loads real data, lazily loads Highcharts on demand, and plots the data using Highcharts.

Ember 2018 Priorities

We need to ship what we started and let our newer contributors shine and lead.

Videos

Living Animation

What ambitious web application developers need to learn from game developers. Presented at EmberConf 2018 in Portland.

Videos

Design for Learning

This is a wide-ranging talk on learning and why you need to understand how people learn if you want to build good software. Plus I build a fun orbital mechanics demo. Presented at EmberNYC, March 2018.

Videos

How to Add TailwindCSS to an Ember App

There is definitely an intimidation factor some people feel about integrating things into Ember apps. While there are plenty of things I want to make easier too, I think a large amount of the perception only comes from lack of good learning materials. Toward

Mind and Hand

"Mens et Manus" (latin for "Mind and Hand") is the official motto of MIT. Lots of schools have Latin mottoes, and they are usually pretty bland. But mens et manus was — and still is — a radical social statement. It says

Effective team culture: Five Whys & Stop-the-line

When Google set out to measure what makes their best software development teams successful, they found a strong correlation with psychological safety: A shared belief held by members of a

Programming doesn't fit in your brain

“A lot of beginners under-appreciate the degree to which googling things is part of a programmer’s job,” says @steveklabnik #wednesdaywisdom pic.twitter.com/FnXo3rBfPb — Glitch (@glitch) May 31,

Search-first Web Applications

Lots of software projects struggle when they try to implement search-related features. I was reminded of this by @trek's reaction to this Algolia marketing tweet: Development teams often delay building

CSS and Markup in Javascript is an Evolutionary Dead End

There is a popular trend among some Javascript developers to argue that humans should stop writing CSS and HTML (and HTML-based templates). They argue everything should instead be written as

Cardstack Architecture Notes

Many people have expressed an interest in contributing to Cardstack and have been clamoring for some docs to help them get started. This is the first of three posts I

Lake Wobegon Web Development

There is a strain of thought in the web development community that believes there's a tension between having comprehensive developer tools and delivering good user experiences: This is exactly backwards. At the scale of the entire web, better tools are the only way to

Strong Conventions Make Hiring Easier

The most reliable way to evaluate programmer candidates is to hire them to do a bit of realistic work. This is widely understood, but not widely practiced. The biggest barrier is finding projects for them to work on. In most organizations, the overhead of

Frameworks are where we iterate on tomorrow's universal abstractions

The amount of complexity a single human programmer can handle is fundamentally limited. Until our brave cyborg future comes, even the best programmers can only hold so much in their minds at once. And the number of programmers that can productively work on a

On Interface Complexity vs Implementation Complexity

There are two very different kinds of simplicity in software engineering: simple interfaces and simple implementations. Simple interfaces are absolutely critical, because the budget for interface complexity is paid out of your head. But simple implementations are far less important. The budget for implementation

On the irony of programmers who don't like abstraction

An inflammatory anti-Rails post has been getting lots of discussion lately. The author's frustrations are legitimate, but his articulation of the problem takes an absurd turn: The really challenging part in this discussion is being able to explain that it is a problem in

Decoupled Drupal: from an Ember maintainer's perspective

Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert recently launched a community discussion by asking "should we decouple Drupal with a client-side framework?". My high-level takeaway from the discussion is that the Drupal community is serious about finding shared solutions to common problems. Which is

The Framework Learning Cycle

Much of the discussion around frameworks -- particularly in the Javascript community -- is mired in misunderstanding over a key question: who are frameworks really for? Beginner Beginning web developers tend to lean heavily on frameworks. This is a good thing — it lets them