Today was another interesting day at The Iron Yard. It started off with another guest lecture on the importance of testing applications and testing in Ember.js/Ember CLI. The lecture was given by Joel Taddei and he seems to be the most excited about Ember. To be honest, yesterday was a tough one while trying to dabble into Ember. I was a bit overwhelmed at first. After today, I am glad to be learning the framework. I went through Ember’s Todo MVC tutorial and used Ember CLI to build it. I feel like a wizard! Take a little Ember CLI and mix in Handlebars.js and you can have a kick ass app out in no time. Ember is strict, but that seems to be a magical thing right now since I am still currently learning how to structure an application. Ember will make learning other frameworks a lot easier.

During his lecture, Joel gave us a made up quote that I really appreciated.

“To create an Ember.js pie, one must download the universe” — Anonymous

Ember CLI makes setting up a project extremely fast, giving you have installed it through the terminal. Create a new app by simply entering the command “ember new your-app-name”. Ember CLI will build the file structure with everything you need to get started. Talk about productivity! Start up the app by entering “ember server” in your terminal then pull up your browser of choice. Head on over to http://localhost:4200 and now you can see any changes you make live.

After the lecture, I had a short conversation with Joel on how some developers get stuck with the mindset that their framework or programming language of choice is the best. This mindset can be dangerous and it doesn’t make you very valuable as a developer, especially with how fast the industry is moving. You should always be open to learning something new. If you come across an opportunity to be challenged with learning something new, take it!