International Ember Upgrades: Matthias Leitner and Hector Zarco at Runtastic

Real World Ember

We talk about upgrading Ember apps, transitions from Rails to Ember, running a multinational team from Austria, and handling performance on mobile.

• Runtastic
  • Hector and Matthias here with us today
  • located in Linz Austria- 3rd largest city in Austria
  • International team- they’ve got HQs in Linz and Vienna, employ people in 25 different countries
  • Some people join specifically so they can write Ember code
• Going to Ember
  • They first started using Ember in 2012
  • Started by integrating them into existing Ruby on Rails application to replace jQuery code
  • Slowly switching to more Ember-only apps with ember-cli
  • Had to do a big rewrite in the past before Ember due to adding features without thought (The Startup Story)
• Multiple Ember apps
  • Because they “sprinkled in” Ember at first, they have more separate Ember apps than they want and are wanting to merge several together.
  • They bundle the vendor for all their Ember apps separately so that it can be cached- save download time for users.
  • They can deploy each Ember app independently, using a hand-built version of ember-cli-deploy (they built it before the addon)
• Community
  • Finding time to contribute back to open source is a struggle, but they do it when they can
  • fairly good Javascript community for the size (200k people in Linz, 40 people in a Javascript meetup)
  • They’re hiring!
• Personal journeys to Ember
• Upgrades and Addons
  • People who start with backbone almost inevitably need more
  • They had to develop some stuff early on like QueryParams and improvements to the Router (they’re using the defaults now)
  • The upgrade path to 2.0 has been difficult because of large apps and abandoned third-party addons
  • They’re trying not to use alpha addons because of all the difficulties they’re having now
  • Dependency have been difficult due to addons sometimes not specifying well enough
  • They used shrinkwrap for a while, but it was more trouble than it was worth (and now addon authors are better about dependencies)
• Stories from the old days
  • Had to look up the source code a lot
  • Addons have made things so much better!
  • Current version of pods have problems in large organizations, upcoming new version of pods will be awesome!
• Internal code sharing
• Mobile apps built natively, switching some non-core parts to webviews with Ember
• Once again, they’re hiring! Austria is "so beautiful it’s hard to explain in words".
• Performance:
  • Android is where most of the trouble is
  • Reduce blocking stuff, extraneous requests, css complexity
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