Last year’s EmberConf was a conference packed with exciting new things. The Ember 2.0 release was closing in. A lot of 1.0s of big Ember projects would be shipped soon. FastBoot was announced and so was Glimmer. Our new rendering engine got on par with React’s blazingly fast rendering engine. There was a lot of hype and excitement.
This year the atmosphere of the conference was different. Not a bad different per se, but different. This year felt as if we had just completed major goals set out at last year’s conference, and that we were now on track to keep leveling up those achievements in the foreseeable future.
For example, Glimmer II drastically improves upon Glimmer I. The 60fps rendering demo was mind blowing, but it felt different from seeing for the first time how comically bad the rendering engine was before Glimmer 1.0 and then see it run as fast as React’s rendering engine. It was already expected that Glimmer II would improve upon Glimmer I.
There is one big new movement this year. It is the movement of Progressive Web Apps (PWA). FastBoot 1.0 will be released soon and there are a bunch of other exciting projects putting effort into pairing up Ember with ServiceWorkers and other PWA tools that (recently) have been added to (mobile) browsers.
Because of these developments I would like to dub this year:
“Year of Progress and Progressive Web Apps”.
There is another thing I want to mention: Living Styleguides. Chris LoPresto gave a talk about this. I did not yet know of this movement until Luke Melia told me I should go see Chris’ talk. It was supposed to be awesome. I’m glad I followed Luke’s advice and went to see Chris’ talk. You may think that styleguides are for designers, but the way these styleguides are built will actually help developers architect better components.
I had a really good time at EmberConf 2016. I’m excited to start trying out Living Styleguides at DockYard. We’re already using FastBoot and we’re also actively experimenting with Progressive Web App technology.
I look forward to another round of talks that show how the Ember ecosystem has been improved and solidified in 2017. Also to meet all the wonderful people I’ve met this year again.
