Polaris, Starbeam, and the Future of Ember with Godfrey Chan

In 2022, the future of Ember is taking shape thanks to developers like Godfrey Chan. Alongside Yehuda Katz and other engineers, Godfrey's working on a new edition of Polaris. The project has three main goals: to align Ember with the modern npm packaging system, continue to invest and innovate in reactivity, and encourage universal design principles. 

Like many developers, Godfrey came to Ember from Rails. Months after chatting with Yehuda and Tom Dale at EmberConf, Godfrey was hired at Tilde and thrown into the Ember deep end. Today, Godfrey's focused on big picture developments, tackling lofty goals like developing an Ember model to navigate JavaScript classes.

In this episode, Godfrey talks with Chuck and Robbie about what's to come for Polaris, solving major developer headaches, Godfrey's philosophy on frameworks, top use cases for solutions like Starbeam, and why these innovations are necessary in 2022.

Key Takeaways

• [00:29] - A quick intro to Godfrey. 
• [01:49] - A whiskey review. 
• [09:27] - A sneak peek at Polaris.
• [16:15] - Why Polaris is about easy transitions.
• [20:11] - How Polaris plans to evolve. 
• [24:54] - How Godfrey got into Ember. 
• [27:30] - What Starbeam is.
• [32:50] - Use cases for Starbeam.  
• [36:03] - Why Starbeam is necessary in 2022.
• [39:49] - A hobby and people-watching themed Whatnot.

Quotes

[14:54] - "Tools like TypeScript don't automatically just understand what's up within ember app. At least one of the things for Polaris is to figure out how we can transition to a world where we don't have those little tiny differences anymore so that when you open a project in VS Code, TypeScript just knows what's up." ~ @chancancode [https://twitter.com/chancancode] 

[37:46] - "I think conceptually, a reactivity layer that is decoupled from the framework makes a lot of sense to me because there's just a lot of libraries and abstractions that you want to write that eventually, you want people to be able to use them in UI." ~ @chancancode [https://twitter.com/chancancode] 

[39:31] - "I think having something like Starbeam where you can express those reactivity concepts or those annotations without making your library only usable in React or Vue or whatever is a good thing to have in 2022." ~ @chancancode [https://twitter.com/chancancode] 

Links

• Godfrey Chan [https://twitter.com/chancancode]
• Ember [https://emberjs.com]
• Ember Core Team [https://emberjs.com/teams/]
• Rails Core Team [https://rubyonrails.org/community]
• Ruby on Rails [https://rubyonrails.org] 
• Tilde [https://www.tilde.io]
• Lyre's American Malt [https://lyres.com/range/american-malt/]
• Multnomah Whiskey Library [https://mwlpdx.com]
• EmberConf [https://2022.emberconf.com]
• Godfrey's EmberConf 2022 Keynote [https://2022.emberconf.com/talks/keynote-part-2]
• Slides [https://speakerdeck.com/chancancode/virtual-emberconf-2022-platform-state-of-the-union)]
• Yehuda's EmberConf 2022 Keynote [https://2022.emberconf.com/talks/keynote-part-1]
• Slides [https://ember.slides.com/users/sign_in]
• Ember Octane [https://emberjs.com/editions/octane/]
• Ember Inspector [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ember-inspector/bmdblncegkenkacieihfhpjfppoconhi]
• TypeScript [https://www.typescriptlang.org]
• JavaScript [https://www.javascript.com]
• webpack [https://webpack.js.org]
• Visual Studio Code [https://code.visualstudio.com]