Tag: Ember

Prototyping Apps with Ember Octane: Behind the Scenes

On Saturday, I presented Ember Octane to Austin Code Mentorship. I had been hesitant about organizing the workshop (what if no one shows up?). Thankfully, 6 people joined for the whole session, while some more stopped by. In one hour, we prototyped an e-commerce app where a user can view products before making a purchase decision.

Products page for an e-commerce app

This post primarily serves as a retro doc for myself, but also welcomes two audiences. If you are new to Ember and can follow a tutorial without guidance, you can skip to the end. There, you will find instructions and links to the base and finished projects. If you want to run a workshop or onboard a developer, what follows next is for you.

Continue reading “Prototyping Apps with Ember Octane: Behind the Scenes”

Rewriting Apps in Ember Octane

Last Friday, Ember 3.15 was dubbed the Octane edition. To see how easy (and fun) writing an Octane app is, I spent the weekend rewriting my apps Ember Animated (v3.8) and Lights Out (v2.18). Let me share what I learned.

If you have tutorials and demo apps, I encourage you to rewrite them in Octane. You can publish both versions to help everyone understand how the programming model in Ember has evolved over time.

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Write Tests Like a Mathematician: Part 3

In the last two blog posts, you learned that Ember treats testing as a first-class citizen. Out of the box, Ember provides 3 types of tests so that you can fine-tune test coverage and performance. It also supports a variety of addons and debugging tools to improve your developer experience in testing.

Today, we address an important question: How should you write tests? By the end of this post, you will learn 5 simple rules that I like to follow. The rules aren’t do-this-or-do-that’s (cold hard facts). Instead, they carry nuance and interesting side stories. To keep your learning experience fun, I will transcribe my talk at EmberFest 2019 (rather than summarizing it) to engage in a dialogue with you.

Continue reading “Write Tests Like a Mathematician: Part 3”

Write Tests Like a Mathematician: Part 2

Ember provides 3 types of tests out of the box:

  • Unit tests
  • Rendering tests (previously known as integration tests)
  • Application tests (previously known as acceptance tests)

Broadly speaking, these tests differ in two aspects:

  • Which parts of your app they check for correctness. Having different types of tests help separate testing concerns.
  • How fast they execute.

Let’s take a look at each type and when you might use one over another.

Continue reading “Write Tests Like a Mathematician: Part 2”

Write Tests Like a Mathematician: Part 1

Ember gives you the power to write tests and be productive from day one. You can be confident that your app will be correct today and years from now. A question remains: How should you write tests?

Since tests are a core part of the Ember framework and your development cycle, I will dedicate several blog posts on best practices for writing tests, based on my experience at work and former life as mathematician.

Today, we will cover why testing is important, what tools can help you with testing, and how to run and debug your tests.

Please note that some tools may be readily available for Ember only. However, the best practices that I will mention should be independent of your framework. After all, tests are a universal language, just like math is.

Continue reading “Write Tests Like a Mathematician: Part 1”