Ember Changed my Life: Productivity and Outsourcing with Venkat Dinavahi

Real World Ember

We talk productivity, prioritizing your work, Backbone vs. Ember vs. React, and the communication requirements of outsourcing to a different time zone.

• Origin Story
  • Originally learned Ember by joining Coderly
  • Their app was Cook Academy
  • Was really excited by the reusability
  • Was previously using jQuery/ExtJS on frontend, so huge upgrade
• Javascript Package Size
  • We both skipped the Backbone generation
  • Backbone + Router.js- better than nothing!
  • File size of Ember has recently been reduced- a lot!
  • Svelte Builds: Eventually plan to make unique build that will only include parts of Ember that you’re using.
• components make it really easy to separate and decompose your app
• Separation of Concerns > Global Event Listening (for most cases)
• “Ember Changed My Life"
  • “Life was never the same- there was before Ember and after Ember"
  • We write Ember whenever we can, although that’s not always all the time
• turtle.ai
  • Working on building intelligent collaboration tools for teams
  • Problem: You have tasks and notifications all over the place. Information overwhelm.
  • Solution: Intelligent Inbox that automatically prioritizes your messages.
  • Currently working with a company for a year to solve their specific problems with the tech.
• Productivity
  • “How quickly you can get to the desired outcome"
  • Not just how much stuff you can get done- the 80 hour/week worker building the wrong thing is not productive
  • The productivity solution is often not just engineering
  • Push back and make sure you know what people really want
  • Don’t just check off objectives- video game quest mentality doesn’t translate to real world
  • Chess can’t be played with a checklist
  • Ask “why” at every level
  • Code mistakes are easier to fix than higher-level mistakes like building the wrong product
• Outsourcing
  • Started doing this at Coderly
  • South America is great because it’s the same time zone
  • Different time zones (like for Eastern Europe) means that unclear instructions waste an entire day
  • Clear requirements vital for outsourcing unless you’re in the chat room with them
  • Different cultures means more explicitness needed, because can’t fill in as many gaps with shared cultural knowledge (what do Chinese consumers want in an app? Probably different than the average American consumer)
  • Giving the developers more context allows them to make tradeoffs intelligently without checking back
  • Given the Big Why, and then lots of specific details
  • Ember has been great for outsourcing because of the shared conventions and file structure
• React
  • New project was with React because that’s what the outsourced devs wanted to do
  • Not a terrible choice, although both of us prefer Ember
  • Their React app is fantastic and well put together, but shares very little with other React apps besides core
  • Having the best practices happen in React takes a lot of thought
  • Lack of standards has a cost- especially if developers come and go
  • Lots of time spent on choosing options vs writing code
  • React app quality will probably not stand up to being worked on by interns
  • May eventually rewrite in Ember once app gets bigger
  • Feedback for React: start designating things as the officially supported router/flux implementation/etc.
• They’re hiring React developers- email [e-mail]
• Sponsored by EmberScreencasts.com