Ember 2018 Priorities

This is my contribution to the Ember 2018 Call for Posts.

When it comes to community goals for this year, I want to highlight two major themes:

1. Taking all our great ongoing work over the finish line.
2. Letting our newer contributors shine and lead.

Stick the Landing

Our first priority should be to finish shipping the hugely valuable features that our community has been building for the past twelve to eighteen months. It's a really big list! And the bulk of it is getting so close to done. I'm including things like:

• angle bracket component invocation syntax
• @tracked properties
• no more automatic wrapping component element
• full support for ES Class syntax throughout the framework
• out-of-the-box rehydration support for all Fastboot apps
• a more pluggable build system that enables greater community experimentation
• module unification application layout
• seamless interoperability with any ESM-formatted package on NPM (probably the number one request by every other #ember2018 post I've read!)
• CSS Blocks as a first-class option for style-management in every Ember app

Many of these things can already be tried out today, because the implementations are nearing completion. If we keep executing, a year from now we will take all these features for granted, and that will be wonderful.

Let our newer contributors shine and lead

There are plenty of folks like me who have been part of the Ember community for six years. That is like two centuries in Javascript years. We have a lot of accumulated experience and that is a key part of why we've been able to build durable software that continues to evolve while bringing even the biggest, most ambitious apps along.

But we also have an energetic crop of newer contributors who have been absolutely killing it lately. I don't want to try to name names because I will miss some people, because there is more activity than I can track. They are a big reason Ember's future looks very bright to me.

Our priority as a community should be making sure someone who has been contributing great work for half a year feels as much sense of ownership as someone who has been around since Sproutcore 1.6rc2. Our newer contributors are also some of the best ambassadors for teaching and spreading Ember, because they have the zeal of the newly converted, and they don't have as much Curse of Knowledge as some of us Elder programmers.

So if you have been contributing -- for a few months or a few years, through code, docs, events, answering questions, outreach, or the addon ecosystem -- and you ever feel like you're stymied and don't know how to make things happen, please get in touch. If you're thinking questions like:

• how can I lead people to consensus on this new feature?
• how can I help implement this new things everybody agrees they want but nobody has built yet?
• am I really ready to give a big conference talk?
• how can we make the process for contributing to the docs / the guides / the website / the addon ecosystem more open and accessible?

this is an invitation to chat about it. I want to help you succeed and I urge everyone else who is perceived as an oldie with community authority to do the same.

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