Last week we travelled to the hipster capital Berlin to see the latest trends of the Ember.js world at the EmberFest. More than 100 Ember developers and fans were there – including some of the biggest names of the scene, like Erik Bryn or Lauren Tan.

In two days full of talks, we were not only able to take along a lot of useful things for our everyday lives, but also make many contacts and get involved in the Ember community for the first time.

Of course we also had the right Tomster for the conference!

Talks, Talks, Talks!

All lectures were very exciting and mostly also relevant for us. They were recorded and will be published on YouTube as soon as the postproduction is finished.

Numerous current “buzzwords” of frontend development were discussed, including progressive web apps, compile-time optimizations, hybrid apps, testing, etc. In this blog post we would like to introduce two topics in detail, but recommend that all those interested in Ember should take a look at the presentations on YouTube. Especially noteworthy are:

• Ember @ Netflix von Lauren Tan und Offir Golan
• Writing tests like a speed demon with data builder patterns von Daniel Sudol
• The Revolution will Not Be Centralized von Edward Faulkner

User Experience

UX plays a very important role in modern web applications. Jakub Niechciał was able to illustrate this with some examples. In his talk, he explains why the developer is responsible for ensuring that users find the application pleasant and fluid.

Animations (e.g. with `liquid-fire`), Skeleton Screens (with `ember-content-placeholders`) or Button States can be implemented in Ember with some extra effort and improve the usability of applications massively. Only a few days after the EmberFest we were able to implement some of these principles in our projects, which was clearly noticeable.

Djember

Emmanuelle Delescolle held another exciting and for us relevant talk about Djember. During the last months she worked on addons for Django and Ember to take the collaboration between these two frameworks to a new level. On the one hand we worked on the `DRF-schema-adapter`, which will allow Django to generate dynamic frontends (in this case with Ember) and on `ember-cli-crudities`, which will allow you to create dynamic forms and lists using a JSON representation in Ember.

Since we also work with the same stack (Django and Ember) in several of our projects and have already had ideas in a similar direction, we are happy to take a closer look at these projects and try them out! Who knows, maybe there will even be a cooperation in the future. 🙂

Dinner Cruise

The Ember community is also convincing in addition to technical topics! The conference ended with a dinner cruise on the Spree River on Friday evening. On the three-hour trip with dinner, pork, wine and beer, people could talk about other technical topics, work, magic and the meaning of life and let the EmberFest 2017 fade away.

Conclusion

Short and sweet: Interesting talks, super community and good organization – the first participation in an Ember conference was great fun! Thank you EmberFest