Dear Boss,

Companies like Square, Yahoo, Groupon are going out of their way to

deliver the best user experiences to their users. To do this, they are adopting modern technologies and development

patterns that allow them to build better products, faster.

If you want to stay competitive as a company, your team needs to be on

top of these new technologies and know how and when to use them.

By today’s standards, a great user experience can only be achieved by

meeting the following requirements:

1. A modern front-end

2. Fast product iterations

3. Developer joy

Let me share what I mean by that.

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1. A modern front-end

A modern web app is very fast and feels almost like a native desktop /

mobile app. It can load data very quickly from remote APIs and

responds to user actions by refreshing only the relevant sections in the

page, rather than refreshing the entire web page.

To be able to deliver fast performance and rich interactions, your team

needs to leverage modern concepts like:

• client-side templates and data binding

• front-end routing

• data models connected to REST APIs

• web components

Most modern front-end frameworks implement these concepts using

their own specific conventions. Once the team masters these concepts, it

will be easy for them to pick up any new framework that they want.

Ember is one of the more popular frameworks and has been adopted by

a lot of influential companies lately. But Ember is not only a great

framework for large companies, it is also great for learning and

mastering front-end development. Here are a few reasons why:

• It has very strict opinions about how these concepts should work

together. Ember is built specifically for complex web

applications and your team can learn a lot from the design

decisions that are built into this framework and actually use

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them in your own products.

• The makers of Ember run a consulting company and build

projects using Ember every day. This is very important, because

they feel every pain that developers feel when using the

framework and are very quick to integrate the best design

patterns into the framework. We have an opportunity here to

benefit from the knowledge that the Ember core team gains from

their consulting projects.

• Another aspect is the command line interface of Ember. It packs

state of the art tools that make development a joy:

• blueprints for common classes

• a very fast build process

• mock servers to simulate network requests while the front-

end is under development.

Again, there is a lot to learn from all these tools and you can use the

ones that you like.

By learning how Ember works, I am confident that your team can then

easily pick up new technologies.

For example the team can learn React Native, to build native mobile

apps using JavaScript.

They all use the same concepts and Ember teaches us some great design

patterns that can be used to build complex, maintainable apps.

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2. Iterate your product really fast

A product will never be perfect on first release. You need to have the

ability to iterate really fast and adapt to customer needs. And this

really depends on how your team designs and writes the code.

Ember is known to help developers build and iterate complex projects

really fast and I think that your team can learn a lot from this

framework.

“Choosing an opinionated framework has really paid off, since we can

easily move developers between projects; they immediately know how to

start contributing and the proper patterns to follow. [...] I

underestimated the benefit of having a framework comprised of objects

with extremely clear roles” — Mike North, Principal UI Engineer & Engineering Lead at Yahoo

“For us, the biggest unexpected benefit has been leveraging Ember’s

framework conventions to just get work done.” — Allen Cheung, Engineering Manager at Square

3. Developer joy

“Our initial reason for moving to a new technology stack was rapid

iterations. But the one which we hadn’t considered was developer joy. [...]

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Developer joy wasn’t the initial reason we set out to go with JavaScript

and node, but in retrospect I think it’s the most important. Our

developers are now extremely passionate and excited about what they are

working on. This is resulting in better products and experiences for our

customers.” — Jeff Harrell, the Director of Engineering, Business and Payments at

PayPal, talking about their migration from C++ and Java to Node.js.

It’s easy to understand that the happier the team is while coding, the

more motivated it is to do a great job. You need to always be thinking

about how to improve your development processes and make them more

enjoyable. This is also something that you can learn from Ember.

Considering the above points, I suggest that it would be beneficial for

any of your team members involved in front-end development to take a

course on Ember.js and I would like to kindly ask you to support them

financially.

I’m not saying that you need to migrate all your products to Ember

tomorrow, but you need to get a good handle of the best tools on the

market, so that you can:

• incorporate the lessons that they teach into your existing

products

• use them in your next projects

• rewrite critical parts of your products using the best tools for the

job

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Thanks for your consideration, Andrei Soare, Co-founder Talentbuddy

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