Ember Dreams: Michael Swanson at SkillsEngine

Real World Ember

We talk matching skills with education and careers, our favorite Ember features and addons, the tension between increasing efficiency and reducing your bus number, learning Ember in the run up to 2.0, and why tai chi desks are the way of the future.

• introducing Michael Swanson
  • started off building marketing websites with wordpress/jQuery
  • second career in software development with Javascript and EmberJS
  • dark sordid past: 500-line jQuery files
  • side hobbies: doing manual stuff like working out, woodworking, gardening
  • introducing: the tai chi desk. A peaceful improvement to treadmill desks. SOMEONE, PLEASE MAKE THIS.
• SkillsEngine
  • curated database of skills and occupations
  • “get people better employed and better trained"
  • helps people decide which skills to gain based on market demand
  • there’s a mismatch between what industry wants and what schools typically teach
  • helps identify modular skills that work between various jobs, letting job-seekers discover which positions they’re closest to being qualified for
  • how careers are like Japanese role-playing games
  • necessary skills (like “responsive design” or “EmberJS”) emerge quickly, and SkillsEngine can help identify them
• Using Ember
  • currently redoing the entire marketing site in Ember
  • the only thing “for sale” right now is the API, but they’re going to be building Ember apps that use it as well
  • Align, a new Ember app that they’re in the process of building, which will help educators align their curriculum with industry requirements
  • Marketing site is currently built with Mirage as a “backend"
  • Company has only been around for 8 months- 5 team members: 3 developers, a founder, and sales guy.
  • The other devs are a Rails dev and a machine learning dev, but they’re cross-pollinating knowledge when they get time
  • Reducing bus number vs. being efficient
  • They’ve used Ember contractors to supplement the team- onboarding was very easy because of both Ember conventions and previous relationships
  • new Mirage versions are really exciting! 2.0-beta build has JSON-API and an ORM
  • Mirage has helped facilitate the discussion with the backend devs
  • making Ember secure with private APIs has been a challenge- they’ve been looking at using Javascript Web Tokens
  • being a new Ember Dev in the transition to 2.0 was difficult
  • Components > Views
  • Everyone should watch EmberScreencasts
  • Ember Meditations- coming soon, right after the tai chi desk
  • Ember Dreams, Ember Nightmares
  • Closure actions and Services are also awesome
  • they’re not hiring right now, unless you’re both awesome and willing to work for equity
• Sponsored by EmberScreencasts.com