Real World Ember
International Ember Upgrades: Matthias Leitner and Hector Zarco at Runtastic
Episode Summary
We talk about upgrading Ember apps, transitions from Rails to Ember, running a multinational team from Austria, and handling performance on mobile.
Episode Notes
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
- Sponsored by EmberScreencasts.com