Literally Thousands of Components: Neil Thawani and Jessie Graves at Infegy.

Real World Ember

We talk reasons to choose Ember, the Javascript dev hiring process, and how to upgrade a 2.5-year-old Ember app that contains 1800 components.

• We’re interviewing Neil Thawani and Jessie Graves from Infegy Atlas
• Guest interviewer: Erik Hatchett from ProgramWithErik.com
• Infegy Atlas
  • Kansas City, working onsite
  • Infegy Atlas helps corporations understand what their customers want through Social Media Intelligence
  • For example, Infegy Atlas helped McDonalds discover what would make their customers love Breakfast All Day
• Getting started:
  • Jessi had experience with SproutCore, but they still had trouble getting started (pre-1.0, when documentation was scarce)
  • They have a 2.5-year-old Ember app (!)
  • She cited the community and solid conventions as one of the big reasons they chose Ember
  • Because of those conventions, Neil was able to push code within his first week at Infegy
• At one point they got behind on Ember upgrades (1.5 through 1.13 + switching to ember-cli) and that’s been one of their big difficulties
  • They used regexes and Python scripts to help upgrade their code
  • It's difficult to find an Ember developer, but they were able to find a solid Angular developer and he’s already committing to the code.
• Components:
  • They have 1800 (!!!!) components. That is not a typo.
  • lots of small single-purpose components with minimal interface
  • a few larger ones built up from the smaller components
• They have a new app Canvas which is built on the latest Ember versions and best practices.
• One huge benefit to Ember is the opinionated structure, which has helped a lot with coordinating as a team.
• One huge drawback was that it used to be difficult to work with SVG, but htmlbars has fixed that.
• They will eventually be hiring more Ember, D3, and Python devs- if you’re in Kansas City Missouri, go talk to them!
• Experience of hiring most recent developer
  • Hiring a Javascript developer was easy, hiring someone who really knew Javascript was difficult.
  • Their hiring process is resume + cover letter, then a phone chat (for technical interview + culture fit), then a coding challenge (different depending on the position), then an in-person interview.
  • A common mistake was not knowing much beyond jQuery and the typical Javascript Interview Questions (fizzbuzz, recursion, etc.)
  • The person they hired demonstrated both technical skill and cultural fit by taking their API and independently coming up with their UI.
• This episode is sponsored by EmberScreencasts.com- video tutorials for intermediate-level Ember developers.