Crowdfire

Today we shipped www.crowdfireapp.com which we’ve been working on since a month. The dashboard is completely written in Ember using Ember CLI and deployed to Amazon S3 keeping it totally independent of the backend.

To give you more context, I joined Crowdfire (formerly JustUnfollow) team in the mid December last year. Our immediate goal for 2015 was to rebrand and more importantly to rewrite the existing web interface which was serving our users since past 5 years.

Ember is not so common in JavaScript dev community here in Mumbai or Bangalore. There’s quite a buzz around ReactJS. However, Ember was on my list since long and their roadmap is pretty concrete in terms of guideline, improvements, release cycle etc. I’ve done production apps on Backbone and AngularJS as well where latter seems to be very flaky in their future roadmap and former is way too basic in its offering respectively. Also, Our team had few months of experience in AngularJS and we already did some of the ground work for kick starting the project. But, finally after some convincing we took a decision to go with Ember rather than sticking around with AngularJS.

While starting up with Ember there are bunch of resources on the internet which gets you started with the framework but most of them share only half-truth and can be really painful in learning phase. Ember has a steep learning curve which can drive you crazy while building your real world web application. I would suggest, better grab Ember-CLI 101 ebook and RTFM. These two resource definitely turned out to be great companion while getting my head around the framework.

Conclusion

I’m glad we chose Ember. Our team is having a good time so far.

Ember is a solid and robust for building web applications. Moreover, if you’re a Ruby and Rails fan like me then you will completely fall in love again with frontend development while using the framework. It has all the goodness of both with some extra sugar which takes the whole web application development at another level of fun and it does get better with every release. Thanks to the amazing team behind it and the awesome community, IMO Ember is changing the way web applications are built.

One of the mistake I’ve seen new devs in Ember make is they still think in “previously used framework” or “Plain JavaScript” way. This should not be the case while writing in Ember. Ember solves the problem is its own way. Unless you embrace “think in Ember” philosophy you won’t be able to reach the zen of it.

Good luck. Ping me on @BilalBudhani if you’ve any questions for me.

P.S: I wrote a small plugin on Ember-CLI for oh-my-zsh here.