Introducing Subteams

I'm very happy to share with you our plan to scale Ember's day-to-day decision-making and coordination—something we're calling Subteams. We mentioned some of this in this year's EmberConf keynote, and wanted to expand on the specific details.

Ember.js was once just a view layer for rendering templates in the browser, but has grown to become a complete SDK for the web. With one npm install , you get everything you need to create a modern web application.

Making things simple for developers often means a lot of coordination and decision-making behind the scenes. As the number of pieces making up Ember has grown—encompassing not only Ember.js but Ember CLI, Ember Data, the Ember Inspector, documentation, and more—we want to ensure that the Core Team does not become a bottleneck for progress.

At the same time, we believe that having a strong vision that everyone can rally behind is critical to building software that feels cohesive. So how do we ensure that everyone is pulling their cart in the same direction, without losing momentum?

We're taking a page from Rust's playbook and adopting the idea of Subteams. While we've often had informal teams tackle specific tasks, this change formalizes that process and officially recognizes the hard work of these contributors.

Core Team

The Core Team serves as the leadership for the Ember project as a whole. Its responsibilities include:

Setting the overall direction and vision for the project. This means setting the core values that are used when making decisions about technical tradeoffs. The core team also leads the writing of RFCs around new initiatives.

This means setting the core values that are used when making decisions about technical tradeoffs. The core team also leads the writing of RFCs around new initiatives. Setting priorities and the release schedule. Design bandwidth is limited, and it's dangerous to try to grow the framework too quickly; the core team makes some difficult decisions about which areas to prioritize for new design, based on the core values and target use cases. The regular release cycle, being one of the project's core values, applies to subteams as well.

Design bandwidth is limited, and it's dangerous to try to grow the framework too quickly; the core team makes some difficult decisions about which areas to prioritize for new design, based on the core values and target use cases. The regular release cycle, being one of the project's core values, applies to subteams as well. Focusing on broad, cross-cutting concerns. The Core Team is specifically designed to take a global view of the project, to make sure the pieces are fitting together in a coherent way.

The Core Team is specifically designed to take a global view of the project, to make sure the pieces are fitting together in a coherent way. Spinning up or shutting down subteams. Over time, we may want to expand the set of subteams, and it may make sense to have temporary "strike teams" that focus on a particular, limited task.

Over time, we may want to expand the set of subteams, and it may make sense to have temporary "strike teams" that focus on a particular, limited task. Going/no-going features. While the subteams make decisions on RFCs, the Core Team is responsible for pulling the trigger that moves a feature from canary to beta. This provides an extra check that features have adequately addressed cross-cutting concerns and that the implementation quality is high enough.

Each subteam is led by a Core Team liaison. This member is responsible for keeping the Core Team apprised of progress on important initiatives, identifying potential areas of concern early, and escalating cross-cutting issues when needed.

Ember CLI

Slack channel: #dev-ember-cli

Discourse category: Ember CLI

Core Team Liaisons: Stefan Penner & Robert Jackson

Members:

Katie Gengler

Chad Hietala

Jake Bixby

Nathan Hammond

Kelly Selden

Tobias Bieniek

Ember Data

Slack channel: #dev-ember-data

Discourse category: Ember Data

Core Team Liaison: Igor Terzic

Members:

Clemens Müller

Christoffer Persson

Stanley Stuart

Brendan McLoughlin

Learning

Slack channel: #-learning

Discourse category: Learning

While the Ember CLI and Ember Data subteams should be self-explanatory, this one is the newest and may require some explanation.

We intentionally did not call this subteam Documentation, because documentation is just one part of how new users learn to use Ember. People start learning the second they land on the website homepage, or when they see a presentation at their local user group.

We want to make holistic learning a central part of Ember. In addition to good guides and API documentation, this means thinking about how members of the community interact, how they get help, and how we introduce them to new features added via the RFC process.

The Learning Subteam is responsible for the website, the guides, the API docs and making sure the Core Team is aware of common pitfalls people hit, like confusing error messages or APIs. We will take this information and feed it back into the framework itself.

The best documentation is the documentation you never have to write. By reducing complexity, making errors clearer, and smoothing the learning curve, we can help Ember reach an entirely new audience.

Core Team Liaison: Leah Silber

Members:

David Baker

Ricardo Mendes

Todd Jordan

Thank You

You can find information on the subteams and their members at http://emberjs.com/team/. We will keep this page up-to-date as people come and go.

A big thank you to the members of these teams, who donate their time and energy to make the web a better place. If you're interested in helping, please reach out to one of the above team members for the best way to get started.

We are excited at the pace at which Ember has grown, and we think it uniquely solves the challenge of building modern web applications in a way that doesn't push all of the complexity to the app developer. We could not build as ambitiously without the dedication of these people. Please join me in welcoming the new subteams, and in thanking for them all of their hard work!

Many thanks to the Rust Core Team and particularly Aaron Turon's Governance RFC, and subteam announcement, from which parts of this post are adapted.