looking forward to making some new ones as well. Today I'm going to be talking about Ember as both a pioneer and an elder. I know the talk didn't have a lot of information on the Ember website, the EmberConf website. There's a reason for that. So let's look back

at where we're coming from and how we got here. So yeah, a basic introduction. My name is Kenny Bolo-Meyer-Steven. Kenny Bolo is pronounced as Kier-ni-bow-lo, but you can always call me Steven as well. I'm an engineering manager at Forest. Forest has its HQ in Dublin.

But I'm also Geldad and I live in Finland. A quick interesting fact about Finland, not a lot of people know. Well, you probably know we're the happiest country in the world, but we're a bilingual country. We speak both Finnish and Swedish. And although the country

is sparsely populated, about 5.5 million people, and the Swedish-speaking population is just about 5%, I do happen to fall into that 5%. So on that note, welcome to midforedrag.

Tarvatore wa kesku stavun, which is basically just Swedish and Finnish for welcome to my talk. All right, so today I want to talk about Ember. Ember as an elder and Ember as a pioneer.

What do we mean? What are we talking about? Today we want to dive into how Ember has been a fundamental and big part of a lot of developments in the web community, how we have been a major driver for a lot of students. But first, before we go in, a lot has happened, a lot has changed

since the last time I was here. I was on the stage, I believe, in 2019. And just after that, COVID struck. Not too long down the way. And a lot of things changed. For good,

sometimes not so good. There's a few things, just to point out, of course, maybe most folks here already know, but our core team still got a hit during COVID because obviously we rolled in with different challenges. A lot of folks also lost their jobs. So it's been a tough time. We're still recovering as an industry, as a community as well, but it's

really nice to see new faces here as well. But also another interesting part is babies. The last time I was here, I remember Leah coming up on stage with her child, and now there are two of them. The last time I was here, I was definitely not a girl dad, so

I'm also a victim of the COVID. Not a victim in a bad way, just to clarify. Yeah, and I also had my daughter in that period. But the fun fact here I wanted to state is not a lot of people know, but in the core teams, for folks who have actually been in the core team

during the time that we have actually been in different core teams in EMBA, we've had 20 babies. So that number was probably 18 or 19 a few years ago, maybe less than that,

but after COVID, yeah, quite a significant number of those babies came in. But okay, I want to give a huge shout out to a few people in the community, a few that you might not always see. First, I'll start with Matt. I know he's somewhere here, so just a few words because we were talking about EMBA as a parent and an elder. I wanted to talk about

a few longstanding members of the community. What can I say about Matt? He's calm, collected, quite unassuming, but he always gets shit done, literally, every single time. And he's

been a mainstay in the community for a long time. I know, as you know, Leah, you know Ed, you obviously know Yehuda, Tom, but there are also a few other folks in the community who have been around for a long time, and I think it's just right to actually give them some credits as well. And of course, we have Mel. Full disclosure, they actually don't know about this, so I picked

their pictures from GitHub because if I asked them, they wouldn't know I was going to put them up on stage. Mel loves to build websites for everyone. This is not me saying it, that's what she says, and I think the emphasis here is in everyone. Mel likes to build inclusive

websites. She's been a huge driver of accessibility, and she's been a mainstay in the community. I would say she's actually one of the people that keeps the lights running in Emberland. As you know, on Discord, she's quite active there, and maybe sometimes a handful as well.

She's a member, of course, of the Stein committee, and also of the framework, just as Matt. All right, next up, Chris. Probably a lot of people know him from Empress, but Chris also runs the Ember.js Dublin meetup as well. He's been a mainstay in the

learning community, and he's also a good friend, so I wanted to give him a shout out. He's been around for quite a while, and I think he deserves it as well. Last but not the least, Jen. Jen is full of energy. In her own words, I try to make tech a more welcoming place.

Jen is that one person that energizes everyone around her, and she gets people to get things done, so she's been a mainstay. She's been around, and I think she definitely deserves some flowers. On that note, let's talk about Ember as a pioneer, as an elder. Generally, when we say

pioneer, it's like we're referring to persons who basically make an inroad in something. In this case, if we use a verb, for example, we probably would look at being the first user technology, as the case may be, or getting into some green field or evergreen field, and Ember actually played that role in web development to a significant extent, and we will

go through some of those examples today. But first up, I'll leave you with this beautiful quote from Tom. It's actually one of my favorite quotes. We had to be willing to commit to the vision and be willing to be ridiculed. When Ember started off, it wasn't the fanciest idea to a

lot of people. It also was one of those ideas where a lot of folks actually thought it was going to fail. To be honest, they still think we would fail, but here we are, still not going anywhere. Let's take a short trip down memory lane. I just want us to have a quick look at this

documentary. Just a short clip. There to be a bad idea. You go back and read discussion threads on

places like Hacker News in 2011, and everyone says things like JavaScript apps are broken, please stop writing these, you guys are completely wrong, this is not what the web is supposed to be about, you guys are abusing the system, you shouldn't be writing as much JavaScript, please stop writing JavaScript. Honestly, we were iconoclasts. We had to be willing to commit to

the vision and be willing to be ridiculed. People really thought that we were off in la-la land and that this was just a temporary fad and that we would be going back to writing web applications the way we had always written them before. And now, everyone's writing apps like this.

So yeah, just as I said, and now everyone is writing web apps just as we do. I think an interesting one, which is always my favourite one when I speak at conferences about Ember, is the Ember CLI was so loved, loved so much that the first version of the Angular CLI

was actually a fork of the Ember CLI. It's not a fact that they speak about, it's not something we get credits for, but this was actually a fact. And that's how good the fundamentals that we built them were. So longevity, how long have we been here? You can take a round of this.

Who has any idea when the first version of Ember was released, v1.0? Okay. Yeah, that's close.

So I think the answer to why Ember has been around for so long is multi-faceted in the sense that we built right from the beginning, but we've existed today because Ember belongs to this community, not to any one company. And that's a fundamental reason for longevity so far.

How old is Ember? I'll go through it, but I actually found a very good clip about EmberJS and our age and longevity, so I actually wanted to share this with you as

well quickly. It's been quite a ride. It's old, but it's not necessarily old in the way that is antiquated or anything. We just need to keep working on the right stuff. So yeah, we're actually quite old. Probably older than you think, but yeah, it's been quite a ride

and I'm glad we've actually gotten to this point today. So this is more like a timeline of Ember releases. The very first version, like I said, you're close. The very first version was in 2011 and there's been a significant progress all through. 5.00 was actually released as well, just

not too long ago, a few months ago. But down this lane, obviously, this is not the only releases that we've had. As you know, actually a lot of effort goes into releasing EmberJS, so let's look at a much more representative timeline. On the green side, we have a lot of

the releases for LTS and up above, you have the timeline for when major versions are actually released. And there's a lot that goes into releases. There's planning and actual development and beta release candidates. We go on stabilization, we do deprecation warnings,

release candidate is ready, an official release and after that there's also a lot of things that will go on with documentation, community discussion and then, of course, we talk about maintenance as well. So making a Ember release, it's not the easiest of things, but this community

is always bonded together and got things out and that's good as the healthy community we have built all the time. And on that note, let's talk about community. When people think about EmberJS outside Ember, what they see first of all is, oh, it's a JavaScript framework. When we think about

Ember, we think about the community that we have. So it's not just about the code, it's not just about the infrastructure behind the code, it's also about the people behind the code and that infrastructure. At EmberJS, we have people who are genuinely invested into the project

and into the community, sometimes even on a very personal level. Of course, obviously invested on a technical level, but also quite personal level. I think Marco had a good explanation for this, which I think applied to me as well, so I will quickly share a clip from Marco for this one. How do we actually stand out as a community? What's a superpower?

So we have actually, we have hired people who said, I want to join your company so I can work with Ember. Many people are strongly invested in the project and in the community on a personal

level even, and that makes a big difference. So a fun fact here is after COVID, when I was actually looking for my next role as well, the first criteria for me was it had to be a company that worked with Ember and was ready to invest in Ember as well. And I think that goes for a lot of

members of this community as well. When I just invested in the project and the fact that we actually use it, I do use a lot of other different projects as well, but the view and reacts depending on what I work on. But Ember is home, Ember will always be home. And let's look at a

few things that Ember folks say. Again, full disclosure, they weren't aware that I was actually going to put this, so I'll start with Melanie. Mel likes to build websites for everyone, and Ember enables her to do that because Ember is that framework where both beginners and experts

can actually work together collaboratively, regardless of the technical level. Jen says she tries to make THEC more welcoming. Ember is a welcoming community, and as you can see in Mel's closing slides, it was all about encouraging people to get involved in contribution.

We are a community that doesn't do gatekeeping. We're focused on a healthy community. It's about the collective and not specific people, so it's a project that everyone can get involved in.

Yehuda says sometimes that tells you if you're a beginner, this is for you. I think that's quite important as well. A significant part of my career I spent also teaching beginners. I ran Codafreak, which was a non-profit bootcamp for a while for

underrepresented folks in tech, and the focus was actually teaching beginners. There are a lot of frameworks out there, but I chose Ember because you could actually start getting productive quite easily. The entry barrier was quite low, and I think that's what Yehuda

was trying to emphasize here as well. It's a framework that anyone can use, and even as a beginner, you will feel confident to actually be able to get productive whilst using Ember. Leo is in here, so go ahead. I will not trade building open source software with this community,

and I think a lot of people here will probably share that same sentiment as well. Because of how tightly knit we are and how committed we are to the project, you find a situation where people who actually invested in Ember, like Mark was saying, actually invested in it on even a personal level. So here we have John, John Will Durham. He's the CTO at Forest, and when asked why Ember,

I have a quote there. We needed something out of the box, something that was stable and reliable.

I think this also summarized Ember to a very good point. I will play a short clip that explains his thought process and why they choose Ember. Okay, I think I can't get the audio out.

Alrighty, we will get back to that audio eventually. As a community moving together, I will just summarize what John said in his audio clip, since I couldn't play it out. But it basically spoke about selecting Ember as the web development tool when the company decided

to move to web in 2015 for some specific reasons. It was stable, it was reliable, and you were quite sure that in 10 to 15 years from that time you wouldn't need to have a total rewrite of your

app. You were quite confident that you could actually get developers to come on board and actually get productive as soon as possible. And above that, the last bit which he mentioned in the audio was the fact that although people say, oh, Ember is a small community, it's not

too huge and there's not a lot of people in it, it was one of the main attractions for Forest because it meant that they found a community where they knew their voice could be heard,

where they knew they could be a part of the collective as opposed to one which they were just in the air pretty much. Now, when we say we move together, just to tie into what John said, when we look at longevity and we see how we've managed to do it,

there's a lot of things that go into moving versions, but I think some of the undimensioned bits are the code mods and guides. A lot of work goes into guides educating us how to move our apps but also the code mods. There's probably a few people who might not know what code mods are,

but usually they come quite handy when you need to migrate an app. And to a large extent, they help you do all the heavy lifting. I'll simplify it that way to a very large extent.

This is actually quite useful and Ember does invest in this as a community because we see the importance of making sure that the apps that you write today can actually live the test of time. In conclusion, you don't have to go to your manager and say, we need to stop feature

development for two, three years. We need to do a rewrite of Ember. That's not how EmberJS works. That's not how it was built to work. And I think this is why it stands out. It's a beacon of stability, a beacon of reliability. And as a community,

we have been the drivers of that, making sure that Ember is what it is today. I know when we talk about Ember, we always look at Yehuda and Tom, and of course they have been at the forefront of it, but every member of this community has been a significant part of what Ember is today.

And we should feel good about ourselves, honestly, because it's not an easy fit. We should absolutely be proud of ourselves. And to address the question of, you know, every time I speak at a conference, we always have that same thing, like, how long is Ember going to stay? Is Ember going to die? I was really happy today,

Yehuda going to Polaris and Ed giving the long low down embroidery. But Melanie had a very good summary for it about Ember, and I think this is the note I would finish on. All the good ideas will end up in Ember. It's just a matter of time.

And that is true. All the good ideas always end up in Ember. It's only a matter of time. Thank you so much. Tak kiitas.