Everything they didn’t tell you about the Ember Community
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Jordan, Jessica
The Ember community describes a worldwide subculture consisting of developers, contributors, bloggers, event organizers, podcasters and many others involved in activities around the framework. But which factors drive this complex community in its efforts? After a retrospective of open-source activity in the ecosystem, we’ll see which core resources and addons are particularly popular and which topics are particularly interesting to the community. Summing up these findings, we’ll finally try to answer how diversity and growth of this community can be furthered even more in the future.
 Hi, everyone. Today I want to share with you everything that they didn't tell you about the Ember community. And in this talk, I want to show you what the community in Ember is actually about. Also, what kind of strengths I have found in the community and also how we can leverage these strengths to actually overcome any challenges that we might still have in actually growing and still further improving our community. And before we get started, just a few words about myself. Or maybe in a bit. I'm a software engineer working at Simplabs via consultancy that is specialized in EmmaJS, Ruby and Rails, and also Phoenix and LXC Consulting. And we offer team augmentation but also reviews and trainings. Also, I'm a member of the Ember core learning team and also am one of the editors of the EmmaJS times, which is the weekly newsletter that is provided to you in box to keep you up to date what is happening contribution wise in Ember. And let's actually get into the topic. When we think about youth culture and also specifically music culture, we find there are a lot of like distant groups that we can identify easily by their style of fashion and also the way they kind of like present themselves to the outside world. And easily or at least for me, I can really identify with that being like a recovering Gothic kid from the Nazis and no offense if you're still into Gothic music, it's actually pretty cool. I can say there is a lot of like identity around these specific subcultures that we create for ourselves. And it's more than just like this common interest in a specific music genre. It's actually something that you build together like a community that actually creates something on top of the shared common interest that you have and that actually brought you together in the first place. And personally, I believe it's not only about music that enables people or that kind of like induces people to create subcultures. I also believe that actually technology is someplace where people frequently actually create subcultures. Some subcommunities that have like a common certain core belief to it that brings people together. And let's actually have a look at what the definition of a subculture is to better understand what it is about. A subculture is defined as a cultural group with a larger culture often having beliefs or interests at variance with those of the larger culture. So this actually carries two meanings. First of all, the subculture is still a part of the bigger group. It still shares a lot of similarities with this group and a lot of like core interests. But on the other hand, it also is distinct from it. It has like some certain beliefs, philosophies, paradigms that actually clearly differentiate itself from the larger group. And being here right now at EmberConf and just like seeing so many people coming from all over the world together to actually share this common interest in a framework and a technology that we all use and love, maybe even on a daily basis, also gives me a sense of being part of a subculture. Some kind of group or community that is a smaller picture of the JavaScript community. And therefore I would, yeah, therefore I would proclaim that what is happening here is actually some display of the Emberista subculture, as I heard about that people in the Ember community refer themselves to sometimes. And it describes a group that is part of the larger JavaScript community that also has like every now and then different beliefs and different philosophies than the bigger picture. And I wanted to find more out about this very distinct beliefs that we have in this community. And I set out and actually wanted to learn more about how we interact with the framework and also how we interact with people in the group. With that said, let's actually have a look at how we develop with Ember. How is it actually used and how has it developed in, yeah, the past year? When I was thinking about how I could evaluate the usage of Ember and how it's currently kind of like how its popularity might look like in the community so far, I was thinking that probably a good place to start is looking at the MPM registry. Just like looking at the absolute download numbers of Ember or Ember Seal I might give me like a kind of like picture of how it's currently going. And I also think what is interesting to note here is that due to the fact that Ember Seal I and Ember are highly intertwined, I can also easily assume that if I look at the download numbers of Ember Seal I also get a picture of how Ember is actually used. And just like a word of warning beforehand, if I now show numbers for any kind of like download codes for like MPM, we still have to keep in mind that they can never reflect the actual end users installing the modules into their application because we all know that a lot of like CLI tools test suite and also like mirrors like other registries that copy and download packages from the MPM registry will also go into this download numbers. So if you're looking at any statistics, we also have to keep in mind they can only give us like a vague idea of a trend going on, some kind of like maybe development over time, but you can never take these absolute download numbers as granted for, okay, so many users have kind of installed Ember Seal I in the app. So just that you know. And looking at the download numbers, the month download numbers for Ember Seal I, we can see that since the last year, so since the beginning of 2017 until the very now that the, yeah, I would say the download numbers remain quite stable between 300,000 to maybe 350,000, 380,000 downloads per month have been registered in the MPM registry for Ember Seal I. And this is interesting to note, but I also found interesting to see what is it actually about this Ember Seal I that we all share it so much that it has become this ingrained part of the community. And I also wanted to have a look at other communities and how they actually deal with scaffolding and building the projects and how they actually use similar command line tools. And just like looking at download data also like in the same time frame from the past year, I can see that there are very, yeah, very significant differences in how Seal I is actually adopted in other communities. As you can see here in this graph, you can also see that Angular Seal I, Vue Seal I and also like React app, one of the projects that helps you to create like React applications, all kind of like don't really hit it off regarding download rates. But on the other hand, Angular Seal I, which originates from a fork of Ember Seal I shows that it actually really significantly increases in download rates over time in the last year to almost tenfold of the amount of download rates that it started off with in the beginning of last year. And now you go maybe like why are you showing us a slide? What does it now actually mean? I think for me, the takeaway from this is also something very interesting and I think also very important for, yeah, for the understanding for the community. And it's that even though Ember might sometimes adopt any kind of patterns very early on at some stage where it's maybe not so eminent in the JavaScript community what this pattern is actually about and how it can help to increase developer satisfaction, that sometimes when other communities also adapt similar patterns, it actually is a big success for them. And I find it quite striking to see that Ember can also inspire other subcultures in the bigger JavaScript community to do something that definitely improves developer lives in other scopes. When we further want to evaluate usage of Ember and the Ember ecosystem, a very great resource as you might already know, but if not, I just want to highlight it again, is Ember Observer. And Ember Quartie member Katie Gangland, also creator of Ember Observer, talks also in a talk about the Ember add-on community and Ember comes from 2016 about all the details. So if you want to learn more about it, check it out. The really great thing about Ember Observer is the scoring system. So it gives us an indicator how qualified any kind of like add-ons are. And this is also a great resource to find out what is currently going on in the Ember community and what kind of like popular add-ons are currently out there. And I just had a look at the top ten add-ons, scored through Ember Observer, and wanted to check what download rates are and also how popular they are indicated through GitHub starring. So let's have a look at actually the number of GitHub stars and also how it relates to the number of contributors on GitHub. If you look at the top ten add-ons, scored through Ember Observer, they all have a full score of ten of ten through Ember Observer. You can find there are a couple of, yeah, I would say add-ons that kind of like have a similar number of stars. They sometimes have something about like 200, 500 stars. And we can still see there's like one kind of like big outlier ember data kind of already estimates to over 2,000 stars and also has compared to the other add-ons quite a high number of contributors, which is kind of like impressive. And I think we can easily also understand how these numbers can come up. If we also look on Ember Observer, we find out that, for example, Ember data is both an Ember core add-on, something that's maintained by the core team and also it's like part of Ember applications right from the start. And therefore a lot of developers, when they actually try to build the first Ember apps, they will easily stumble upon Ember data as the default data layer and want to find out more about the project and get curious about what it's about. And this can also facilitate contribution, of course, because, yeah, everyone knows like, yeah, first have to fix the things that are also used on a daily basis and therefore they get like, yeah, curious and interested in the project. If you also have a look at the monthly download rates for the top 10 add-ons, we find that a lot of them actually are even out at kind of like quite a height number actually of like maybe 200,000 until like 100,000 downloads per month. And one outlier that we can also see here is like Embassy iBabble with like over three times the amount of downloads per month. We can see there's quite a significant number and we might wonder, okay, where does it actually come from? I can only estimate where how this data actually comes about, but I would assume that due to the fact that a lot of add-ons also have to rely on actual like transpilation through Babel. They might also come with their own prepackaged version of Embassy iBabble. And once they actually create your app with different versions of add-ons, they also add up to different versions of Embassy iBabble being installed, especially if you handle your package management with, for example, Yarn. And last but not least, let's actually have a look at the ratio of contributors per download. I was a bit interested in that because I wanted to know, okay, they're like very popular add-ons and every now and then they're also like quite popular. Like we can see they are like very, very much downloaded, but I also wanted to know what the ratio actually is between, yeah, the kind of popularity and also the kind of commitment, the kind of amount of contribution that actually grows and kind of flows into the add-on. And here we can also see that, yeah, there is kind of like a contribution going on for many of the add-ons, but Mbadata also is like a big outlier, which can also be explained due to the fact that a lot of the add-ons that actually come with Mbadata default also draw the attention of developers in the first place because they want to fix what's going on in their application. And yeah, this is probably something that we will hear a lot also like today. We already heard about it a bit in Melanie's talk just now. It's really a thing in Mbadata that there's always an add-on for that. And if I say that, I really mean there's an add-on for any use case. And just like looking at the amount of add-ons that provide us with the components, some UI element or some form element that we can integrate into our application, we find a lot of like curious examples of what is currently out there. There are like all kinds of things. There's like an add-on, for example, that helps us to create what you see is what you get editor with a very specific library that probably has like a very, I don't know, maybe not a super high amount of like maintainers around it, but still there's an add-on for that because someone had to use it sometime and they go like, okay, I can do this myself. I can just create an add-on and I can also share it with the community so everyone else doesn't have to worry about this problem anymore. They are also like very popular add-ons like MbapowerSelect or any kind of like other elements out of the Power Family that you might have already used in the app or are using on a regular basis. And also add-ons like Mbap Decorators actually help us to bring future features to Mbap that might not be available yet so we can already indulge in all the good things that we love about what is coming up specification-wise in our applications today. And I really want to bring this point back home that there's really an add-on for everything. So when I had a look again at that, I also found like this specific add-on that you can embed and install easily via Embedrick role and once you actually integrate this component into application template, the user will navigate to this page and what they will get is actually like a req role animation. So this is like, it's unbelievable. I also wanted to have a further look at the contribution and how it actually evolves in the Mba community. So let's have a look at some couple of numbers. If you look at the number of contributors for every kind of like or for a couple of like the core projects, we can also find there's quite a difference in how many contributors at all time are actually prevalent in those specific projects. Most notably, of course, one of the oldest core projects in the Mba community, Mba.js itself, has quite high number of contributors with over 700 people ever having been contributed to the project. Other projects that are also quite popular are learning materials like, for example, the guides, but also embedded data, as you already noticed earlier, is very popular as well as Embedrick, being the one go-to that you actually have to use when you want to create Mba applications. Other more younger projects like Glimmer.js and also Glimmer.vm are not so high in contributor numbers, but this can also either be explained due to the fact that these projects are actually quite young and also due to the fact that maybe there is also like a very fast pace at which these projects currently evolve and therefore it's also limited who can actually just like go in and contribute in the first place. But looking at that, it's quite, first of all, astounding that the number of contributors is sometimes pretty high for the specific project itself. And it also shows that the community really cares about contributing and helping out with the tools that they use on a daily basis. It means how the Mba community actually tries to really alleviate contribution and actually tries to further the interest in making contributions to very core aspects of the framework is the RFC process with RFC standing for Request for Comments. And what it does is actually providing a way for, first of all, the core team to actually communicate to the community what kind of interesting aspects might be out there in the community. It also facilitates for any kind of person, not only like the core team, but any one of you sitting here to, and also if you're not sitting here, like you could also do an RFC. It's not like that. To actually create your own vision of what the framework should actually entail and what you really need to actually get things done and make your apps even better. And last but not least, it also enables all, every one of us to also comment on these things and try to craft or propose it together in a very collaborative and not so much hierarchical, but really group-based manner. And there are a lot of examples actually for very successful requests for comments that have been merged in the past years and specifically in the last year. One of these examples is, for example, the Ember CUNA testing API we do. We will also see a couple of talks like later today that will also focus on that. And in this, for example, the RFC, opened by Robert Jackson or RWJ Blue, as you might know him, proposed a new API that should be used in test suites that come with Admer apps. And it was very rare to see if there were a lot of comments on this specific RFC. And not shortly after has been merged at the end of last year, quest issues popped up. And what does it actually mean? A quest issue just like entails, yeah, kind of like quest, a kind of like story, how actually this feature should be implemented. And it also tries in a very detailed manner to actually break down these kind of issues and specific subtasks that other people in the community can easily pick up. Because if we want to make contribution even easier in the community, I think one of the greatest ways to make this possible is actually to enable people to understand what these features are about and also find ways to easily understand how they can actually help. And quest issues are a great start to actually achieve that, to try to communicate to the community how things could actually be done so everyone feels empowered to actually get together and make it happen. And specifically, if you want to learn more about the RFC 232, you can also listen to the next generation of testing today by Tobias and also the talk by Jamie might say more. They will show you a lot about what this is actually about. Just looking at the number of RFCs that has been opened and merged recently, we can also see here in the red part that there are actually quite a lot of RFCs that are still open and waiting either for your comments as a community or also for further clarification. And this is actually quite a high number if you think about it and also gives us kind of like understanding what is still going on. With over like 54 RFCs, I think we still have a lot of interesting things coming up into Ember. Also here in the violet, like the second biggest part here in this pie chart, we can also see that quite a large number of RFCs have been merged in the last year. With over 24 RFCs having been merged recently, we can also see that there is a certain trend of RFCs actually picking up. So people understand the RFC process better, engage it more and also RFCs actually get merged so they are ready for implementation. And this is actually also quite an interesting thing. A way for the community actually to keep up to date how RFCs are currently implemented and what the status is of the implementation as the Ember.js status board. You can check it out at ember.js.com status board. And what it does is actually give you an overview how the state currently is, what kind of people are championing the specific RFC if you need any kind of like more details, for example, for helping with the implementation and also if there are any related quest issues. And yeah, this actually also found really interesting bringing back home the point that also made earlier about like communities being inspired by other subcultures is that this request for comments process that is kind of like already picking up in the Ember community also inspired many, maybe not many others, but at least like one other community also to pick it up. And I think it's also worth noting that to see that certain processes that already work great for our community can also show other communities how they can actually work in a more collaborative manner. And I think it's really cool to see that because it seems to show that it is a successful process that we should further nourish also in the Ember community. Finally, I wanted to have a look how actually communication works in Ember and also how the Ember is the subculture engages in talking to each other and actually get together. If you have a look at Stack Overflow, which is probably for many new JavaScript developers that come into the community, a kind of like go to point to find out more about the framework or maybe like a total of losing or kind of like just looking up questions on how they could solve something. We see something a little bit like, yeah, a little bit like controversial, I would say. So if we have a look at the stats for the Ember.js tag and how often it is used, Action Stack Overflow, there is a steady decline since the last two years. And then I was a little bit like, okay, what is this actually about? But where is everybody? They are not in Stack Overflow, but I can see everyone of you here. So what are you doing all day? Why are you not on Stack Overflow? Where are you? Or have you already figured out how you fix your apps? And this is why this is going down. I actually found that there are a lot of other communities where people in the Ember world actually engage with each other. And I find that probably the Slack community is one of the most notable examples of where actually discourse happens in our community. And in Slack, actually, I had to look like at some stats. We already have like over 11,500 members, which is quite a bit. I wasn't aware of that. I only talked to a couple of these, so maybe I should check it out again. We have over 160 public channels. This is also quite a lot. And this excludes all the private messages and the private channels. And we also send over 2,700,000 messages. And this is why you sometimes see this thing like the history is deleted because we have so many messages. It's amazing to see that so much is going on. And I want to know what actually people are doing all day in that. And also what kind of channels are there? 160 channels, what do they all do? Of course, there are a couple of defaults that you already opt in when you actually join the Ember community Slack. And they are like general or random and also like the help channel that is very useful specifically for new people to the Ember community to actually ask quick questions that they would otherwise use or carry over to Slack overflow and maybe like just have them laying there for like three days. It's a very straightforward way, specifically as people are from all over the world and can easily just jump in to answer the question. And even if no one is online, at least like locks is online to actually give you an answer. Also, we have a lot of like core and Dev channels like Dev Ember and Dev Ember CLI. We also have like a couple of local channels. So if you're from any other kind of part of the world than the US, you probably also find like maybe, I don't know, maybe a British channel or maybe like a German channel or some kind of other community that you can engage with either in your kind of like area or maybe like even in your native language. And also we have a lot of add-on specific channels. So if you're using some add-on, you want to interact with maintainers, you can easily do that. And last but not least, the biggest chunk that we can see in the pie chart is called other fun stuff. And I just want to have a look what this actually means like what kind of other channels are there. So as Melanie already mentioned her talk, there's of course a topic, a accessibility channel and also many other topic channels that you can find in this kind of area. Also we have the Women in Ember channel that for example helps people to engage in community if they're like a women developer and want to find out more about Ember. And also we have like channels like Give RVG Blue a Beer, which is also quite useful I guess, right? I mean, that's pretty straightforward. And just looking at the overall stats, we see that regarding the number of weekly users that most of the users have over three-quarter, I actually kind of like just there and just like hanging out and reading what's going on, maybe hanging out in announcements or in help or general, just like checking out what's going on. And one quarter is actually messaging and actually sending any kind of like questions or any kind of like comments to other people. Also just looking at the most popular channels and how they actually perform regarding messages, we can see the Help channel is still the most popular one. Like most of the messages are still sent there and actually a lot of this change is happening with a lot of like people that are new in the community, which is actually a great way to reach new people in the Ember world. And also if you look at the number of users of all time, we see that it actually kind of like evenly distributes over the default channels that are already set up when you join the Ember community stack, which also indicates that if you want to drive people in a certain direction, you want to go like, oh, I actually would like that people could see this more. You could just set it up as a default, I was thinking, right? But yeah, this is kind of like an interesting point also to make. Like people just like stay in the channel then and then just go like, yeah, I'm just going to check it out every now and then. And I was curious also who talks the most. So I had a look at like the top five channels that have like the most messages at all time, like since the community existed. And I could see Help is actually quite, actually quite talkative per user, right? I wanted to know like who actually talks the most, like how related to users, how many is it? And Help is quite good with it, General also, Random, Ember Data are also quite a bit, but actually most chatty is really team learning, right? And I'm actually not so contributing to that too much, so I'm wondering who is that actually? And also if we look at the last 30 days and who is actually talking a lot in these channels, you find that a couple of like the channels we already mentioned are also there, team learning is also not too bad, but then we see that for example in topic types we have a lot of activities actually going on. I was a bit curious what this is about, like I don't know why in the past 30 days did something happen or what is going on? So I had a look at Ember Observer again to actually find out if there's an add-on or something that is related to the channel and also find Ember CL TypeScript to be there. And interesting with that is also under the top 10 download at Ember Add-ons and also kind of like has quite interesting download rate. If you're looking at the monthly numbers you can also see that specifically in the last month it really skyrocketed a lot and you also found out that it's mostly due to the fact that a lot of people are picking it up more because recent releases actually implemented some major features that were highly requested in the community and this also shows something very interesting I think about the Ember community, especially if you look at the Stack Overflow trend data about the TypeScript tag that a lot of people are actually curious about TypeScript. And I think this actually brings back the point back home that it's actually cool to sometimes be just a JavaScript developer who goes, yeah, this is actually pretty nitty-gritty. I really like that. I like TypeScript in my application and this is a cool new thing that I want to try out and I actually think like Add-ons are a great way to further this excitement without having to lose the stability that we all cherish and value in the Ember framework. Also lots of great ways for communication exists like the blog through the Ember Core team and also newsletters like the Ember JS times through the Ember Learning team. Other resources and other newsletters like for example Ember Weekly are also there and actually quite popular with over 6,000 subscribers and with the Ember JS times with 1,100 subscribers we can see a lot of people are actually interested in what is going on in the community and subscribe to these newsletters. But I also wanted to know if there's more about that. I mean I subscribed also to a lot of newsletters but what does it actually mean? Are people actually reading that? Are they actually doing anything with the newsletter? And had a lot of more insight into the Ember JS times specifically. And here for example you can see that first of all subscriber count kind of like elevated over time kind of steadily until the 1,100 mark that we are currently at. And also if you are looking at engagement rates we actually also find kind of like striking numbers with an average of 30% engagement rate which is quite a bit. I don't know if you ever worked in marketing but this is not too bad. And last but not least I also wanted to have a look at what for example the spike that we saw earlier in the engagement rate is about. And I had a look at this and then I was like oh okay, yeah right, we sent out the survey. We were just like ask people can you answer this one question survey, 30 seconds or something. And I was a bit like I don't know if people really pick up on that. Will they really do that? But actually in fact over 60% of people engage with that. And I was like oh this is really cute. This is really nice of you. I really appreciate this. And I think this also really nicely shows that there is actually a lot of ways that you can communicate with people in the community and people are really appreciated about this information and also try to give a bit back. And this is also what I really love about the Ember community. It's just like very cozy. So with that said I also want to have a quick look on what is actually happening offline and not only online. With over 68 meetup groups worldwide and also a lot of international conferences like Ember Fest also Ember Camp London and specifically EmberConf where we are here right now. I think there is a great way for us to also engage face to face with the people we already meet online on a daily basis. And also believe that specifically this personal interactions and these events so we can actually see each other as the very human beings that we are are also a very great way for us to actually broaden the community. And I believe this is actually a pretty big point for us as a group as a Emberista subculture to further the stability and also to improve the community in itself. And here I also want to highlight another project that is part of the Ember community. The Ember Women Help Me Win project that for example tries to further leverage the diversity in the community and tries to support women developers to not only be part of the community but also to support them in speaking gigs and also trying to get the message across. And I believe women helping women is probably one of these great means that also are a reason for me actually currently being here. And I would like to see many more of these projects that try to create diversity in our community to emerge to actually further grow our community as ourselves and also hopefully to inspire many other JavaScript subcultures to do something very similar to make it a better place in the technology community. And with that said, I just want to sum up what my findings were when I set out to actually find more out about the Emberista subculture. First of all, I found that the Emberista subculture is very inspiring to many other subcultures and this is actually a really great thing. And I don't want it to change. I actually wanted to be distinct from other subcultures at all times, at least a bit, to kind of like create something new that can also be leveraged by other people. Also, I want to see more efforts to actually further excitement. And I think the atom culture but also a lot of like cool new features that we saw in the keynote are a great way to actually achieve that. Also, I think that leveraging communication is a great means to actually make it more efficient to make people understand the community what is going on. And I think we are already in a great way to do that. And broadening the community, actually approving the overall being of the community is a great aspect to actually make it more stable. But finally, it's probably all about kind of like being awesome, staying awesome. And I'm very happy that it has been so far. So with that said, thank you very much and have a great time at EmberConf. Thank you.
 Hi, everyone. Today I want to share with you everything that they didn't tell you about  the Ember community. And in this talk, I want to show you what the community in Ember is  actually about. Also, what kind of strengths I have found in the community and also how  we can leverage these strengths to actually overcome any challenges that we might still  have in actually growing and still further improving our community. And before we get  started, just a few words about myself. Or maybe in a bit. I'm a software engineer working  at Simplabs via consultancy that is specialized in EmmaJS, Ruby and Rails, and also Phoenix  and LXC Consulting. And we offer team augmentation but also reviews and trainings. Also, I'm  a member of the Ember core learning team and also am one of the editors of the EmmaJS times,  which is the weekly newsletter that is provided to you in box to keep you up to date what  is happening contribution wise in Ember. And let's actually get into the topic. When  we think about youth culture and also specifically music culture, we find there are a lot of  like distant groups that we can identify easily by their style of fashion and also the way  they kind of like present themselves to the outside world. And easily or at least for  me, I can really identify with that being like a recovering Gothic kid from the Nazis  and no offense if you're still into Gothic music, it's actually pretty cool. I can say  there is a lot of like identity around these specific subcultures that we create for ourselves.  And it's more than just like this common interest in a specific music genre. It's actually  something that you build together like a community that actually creates something on top of  the shared common interest that you have and that actually brought you together in the  first place. And personally, I believe it's not only about music that enables people or  that kind of like induces people to create subcultures. I also believe that actually  technology is someplace where people frequently actually create subcultures. Some subcommunities  that have like a common certain core belief to it that brings people together. And let's  actually have a look at what the definition of a subculture is to better understand what  it is about. A subculture is defined as a cultural group with a larger culture often  having beliefs or interests at variance with those of the larger culture. So this actually  carries two meanings. First of all, the subculture is still a part of the bigger group. It still  shares a lot of similarities with this group and a lot of like core interests. But on the  other hand, it also is distinct from it. It has like some certain beliefs, philosophies,  paradigms that actually clearly differentiate itself from the larger group. And being here  right now at EmberConf and just like seeing so many people coming from all over the world  together to actually share this common interest in a framework and a technology that we all  use and love, maybe even on a daily basis, also gives me a sense of being part of a subculture.  Some kind of group or community that is a smaller picture of the JavaScript community.  And therefore I would, yeah, therefore I would proclaim that what is happening here  is actually some display of the Emberista subculture, as I heard about that people in  the Ember community refer themselves to sometimes. And it describes a group that is part of the  larger JavaScript community that also has like every now and then different beliefs and  different philosophies than the bigger picture. And I wanted to find more out about this very  distinct beliefs that we have in this community. And I set out and actually wanted to learn  more about how we interact with the framework and also how we interact with people in the  group. With that said, let's actually have a look at how we develop with Ember. How is  it actually used and how has it developed in, yeah, the past year? When I was thinking  about how I could evaluate the usage of Ember and how it's currently kind of like how its  popularity might look like in the community so far, I was thinking that probably a good  place to start is looking at the MPM registry. Just like looking at the absolute download  numbers of Ember or Ember Seal I might give me like a kind of like picture of how it's  currently going. And I also think what is interesting to note here is that due to the  fact that Ember Seal I and Ember are highly intertwined, I can also easily assume that  if I look at the download numbers of Ember Seal I also get a picture of how Ember is  actually used. And just like a word of warning beforehand, if I now show numbers for any kind  of like download codes for like MPM, we still have to keep in mind that they can never reflect  the actual end users installing the modules into their application because we all know  that a lot of like CLI tools test suite and also like mirrors like other registries that  copy and download packages from the MPM registry will also go into this download numbers. So  if you're looking at any statistics, we also have to keep in mind they can only give us  like a vague idea of a trend going on, some kind of like maybe development over time,  but you can never take these absolute download numbers as granted for, okay, so many users  have kind of installed Ember Seal I in the app. So just that you know. And looking at  the download numbers, the month download numbers for Ember Seal I, we can see that since the  last year, so since the beginning of 2017 until the very now that the, yeah, I would  say the download numbers remain quite stable between 300,000 to maybe 350,000, 380,000  downloads per month have been registered in the MPM registry for Ember Seal I. And this  is interesting to note, but I also found interesting to see what is it actually about this Ember  Seal I that we all share it so much that it has become this ingrained part of the community.  And I also wanted to have a look at other communities and how they actually deal with  scaffolding and building the projects and how they actually use similar command line tools.  And just like looking at download data also like in the same time frame from the past  year, I can see that there are very, yeah, very significant differences in how Seal I  is actually adopted in other communities. As you can see here in this graph, you can  also see that Angular Seal I, Vue Seal I and also like React app, one of the projects that  helps you to create like React applications, all kind of like don't really hit it off regarding  download rates. But on the other hand, Angular Seal I, which originates from a fork of Ember  Seal I shows that it actually really significantly increases in download rates over time in the  last year to almost tenfold of the amount of download rates that it started off with  in the beginning of last year. And now you go maybe like why are you showing us a slide?  What does it now actually mean? I think for me, the takeaway from this is also something  very interesting and I think also very important for, yeah, for the understanding for the community.  And it's that even though Ember might sometimes adopt any kind of patterns very early on at  some stage where it's maybe not so eminent in the JavaScript community what this pattern  is actually about and how it can help to increase developer satisfaction, that sometimes when  other communities also adapt similar patterns, it actually is a big success for them. And  I find it quite striking to see that Ember can also inspire other subcultures in the  bigger JavaScript community to do something that definitely improves developer lives in  other scopes. When we further want to evaluate usage of Ember and the Ember ecosystem, a  very great resource as you might already know, but if not, I just want to highlight it again,  is Ember Observer. And Ember Quartie member Katie Gangland, also creator of Ember Observer,  talks also in a talk about the Ember add-on community and Ember comes from 2016 about  all the details. So if you want to learn more about it, check it out. The really great thing  about Ember Observer is the scoring system. So it gives us an indicator how qualified any  kind of like add-ons are. And this is also a great resource to find out what is currently  going on in the Ember community and what kind of like popular add-ons are currently out  there. And I just had a look at the top ten add-ons, scored through Ember Observer, and  wanted to check what download rates are and also how popular they are indicated through  GitHub starring. So let's have a look at actually the number of GitHub stars and also how it  relates to the number of contributors on GitHub. If you look at the top ten add-ons, scored  through Ember Observer, they all have a full score of ten of ten through Ember Observer.  You can find there are a couple of, yeah, I would say add-ons that kind of like have  a similar number of stars. They sometimes have something about like 200, 500 stars. And  we can still see there's like one kind of like big outlier ember data kind of already  estimates to over 2,000 stars and also has compared to the other add-ons quite a high  number of contributors, which is kind of like impressive. And I think we can easily also  understand how these numbers can come up. If we also look on Ember Observer, we find out  that, for example, Ember data is both an Ember core add-on, something that's maintained by  the core team and also it's like part of Ember applications right from the start. And therefore  a lot of developers, when they actually try to build the first Ember apps, they will easily  stumble upon Ember data as the default data layer and want to find out more about the  project and get curious about what it's about. And this can also facilitate contribution,  of course, because, yeah, everyone knows like, yeah, first have to fix the things that are  also used on a daily basis and therefore they get like, yeah, curious and interested in  the project. If you also have a look at the monthly download rates for the top 10 add-ons,  we find that a lot of them actually are even out at kind of like quite a height number  actually of like maybe 200,000 until like 100,000 downloads per month. And one outlier  that we can also see here is like Embassy iBabble with like over three times the amount  of downloads per month. We can see there's quite a significant number and we might wonder,  okay, where does it actually come from? I can only estimate where how this data actually  comes about, but I would assume that due to the fact that a lot of add-ons also have to  rely on actual like transpilation through Babel. They might also come with their own  prepackaged version of Embassy iBabble. And once they actually create your app with different  versions of add-ons, they also add up to different versions of Embassy iBabble being  installed, especially if you handle your package management with, for example, Yarn. And last  but not least, let's actually have a look at the ratio of contributors per download.  I was a bit interested in that because I wanted to know, okay, they're like very popular  add-ons and every now and then they're also like quite popular. Like we can see they are  like very, very much downloaded, but I also wanted to know what the ratio actually is  between, yeah, the kind of popularity and also the kind of commitment, the kind of amount  of contribution that actually grows and kind of flows into the add-on. And here we can  also see that, yeah, there is kind of like a contribution going on for many of the add-ons,  but Mbadata also is like a big outlier, which can also be explained due to the fact that  a lot of the add-ons that actually come with Mbadata default also draw the attention of  developers in the first place because they want to fix what's going on in their application.  And yeah, this is probably something that we will hear a lot also like today. We already  heard about it a bit in Melanie's talk just now. It's really a thing in Mbadata that there's  always an add-on for that. And if I say that, I really mean there's an add-on for any use  case. And just like looking at the amount of add-ons that provide us with the components,  some UI element or some form element that we can integrate into our application, we  find a lot of like curious examples of what is currently out there. There are like all  kinds of things. There's like an add-on, for example, that helps us to create what you  see is what you get editor with a very specific library that probably has like a very, I don't  know, maybe not a super high amount of like maintainers around it, but still there's an  add-on for that because someone had to use it sometime and they go like, okay, I can  do this myself. I can just create an add-on and I can also share it with the community  so everyone else doesn't have to worry about this problem anymore. They are also like very  popular add-ons like MbapowerSelect or any kind of like other elements out of the Power  Family that you might have already used in the app or are using on a regular basis. And  also add-ons like Mbap Decorators actually help us to bring future features to Mbap that  might not be available yet so we can already indulge in all the good things that we love  about what is coming up specification-wise in our applications today. And I really want  to bring this point back home that there's really an add-on for everything. So when I  had a look again at that, I also found like this specific add-on that you can embed and  install easily via Embedrick role and once you actually integrate this component into  application template, the user will navigate to this page and what they will get is actually  like a req role animation. So this is like, it's unbelievable. I also wanted to have a  further look at the contribution and how it actually evolves in the Mba community. So  let's have a look at some couple of numbers. If you look at the number of contributors  for every kind of like or for a couple of like the core projects, we can also find there's  quite a difference in how many contributors at all time are actually prevalent in those  specific projects. Most notably, of course, one of the oldest core projects in the Mba  community, Mba.js itself, has quite high number of contributors with over 700 people  ever having been contributed to the project. Other projects that are also quite popular  are learning materials like, for example, the guides, but also embedded data, as you  already noticed earlier, is very popular as well as Embedrick, being the one go-to that  you actually have to use when you want to create Mba applications. Other more younger  projects like Glimmer.js and also Glimmer.vm are not so high in contributor numbers, but  this can also either be explained due to the fact that these projects are actually quite  young and also due to the fact that maybe there is also like a very fast pace at which  these projects currently evolve and therefore it's also limited who can actually just like  go in and contribute in the first place. But looking at that, it's quite, first of all,  astounding that the number of contributors is sometimes pretty high for the specific  project itself. And it also shows that the community really cares about contributing  and helping out with the tools that they use on a daily basis.  It means how the Mba community actually tries to really alleviate contribution and actually  tries to further the interest in making contributions to very core aspects of the framework is the  RFC process with RFC standing for Request for Comments. And what it does is actually providing  a way for, first of all, the core team to actually communicate to the community what  kind of interesting aspects might be out there in the community. It also facilitates for  any kind of person, not only like the core team, but any one of you sitting here to,  and also if you're not sitting here, like you could also do an RFC. It's not like that.  To actually create your own vision of what the framework should actually entail and what  you really need to actually get things done and make your apps even better.  And last but not least, it also enables all, every one of us to also comment on these things  and try to craft or propose it together in a very collaborative and not so much hierarchical,  but really group-based manner. And there are a lot of examples actually for very successful  requests for comments that have been merged in the past years and specifically in the  last year. One of these examples is, for example, the Ember CUNA testing API we do. We will  also see a couple of talks like later today that will also focus on that. And in this,  for example, the RFC, opened by Robert Jackson or RWJ Blue, as you might know him, proposed  a new API that should be used in test suites that come with Admer apps. And it was very  rare to see if there were a lot of comments on this specific RFC. And not shortly after  has been merged at the end of last year, quest issues popped up. And what does it actually  mean? A quest issue just like entails, yeah, kind of like quest, a kind of like story,  how actually this feature should be implemented. And it also tries in a very detailed manner  to actually break down these kind of issues and specific subtasks that other people in  the community can easily pick up. Because if we want to make contribution even easier  in the community, I think one of the greatest ways to make this possible is actually to  enable people to understand what these features are about and also find ways to easily understand  how they can actually help. And quest issues are a great start to actually achieve that,  to try to communicate to the community how things could actually be done so everyone  feels empowered to actually get together and make it happen. And specifically, if you  want to learn more about the RFC 232, you can also listen to the next generation of  testing today by Tobias and also the talk by Jamie might say more. They will show you  a lot about what this is actually about. Just looking at the number of RFCs that has been  opened and merged recently, we can also see here in the red part that there are actually  quite a lot of RFCs that are still open and waiting either for your comments as a community  or also for further clarification. And this is actually quite a high number if you think  about it and also gives us kind of like understanding what is still going on. With over like 54  RFCs, I think we still have a lot of interesting things coming up into Ember. Also here in  the violet, like the second biggest part here in this pie chart, we can also see that quite  a large number of RFCs have been merged in the last year. With over 24 RFCs having been  merged recently, we can also see that there is a certain trend of RFCs actually picking  up. So people understand the RFC process better, engage it more and also RFCs actually get  merged so they are ready for implementation. And this is actually also quite an interesting  thing. A way for the community actually to keep up to date how RFCs are currently implemented  and what the status is of the implementation as the Ember.js status board. You can check  it out at ember.js.com status board. And what it does is actually give you an overview  how the state currently is, what kind of people are championing the specific RFC if you need  any kind of like more details, for example, for helping with the implementation and also  if there are any related quest issues. And yeah, this actually also found really interesting  bringing back home the point that also made earlier about like communities being inspired  by other subcultures is that this request for comments process that is kind of like  already picking up in the Ember community also inspired many, maybe not many others,  but at least like one other community also to pick it up. And I think it's also worth  noting that to see that certain processes that already work great for our community  can also show other communities how they can actually work in a more collaborative manner.  And I think it's really cool to see that because it seems to show that it is a successful process  that we should further nourish also in the Ember community. Finally, I wanted to have  a look how actually communication works in Ember and also how the Ember is the subculture  engages in talking to each other and actually get together. If you have a look at Stack  Overflow, which is probably for many new JavaScript developers that come into the community,  a kind of like go to point to find out more about the framework or maybe like a total  of losing or kind of like just looking up questions on how they could solve something.  We see something a little bit like, yeah, a little bit like controversial, I would say.  So if we have a look at the stats for the Ember.js tag and how often it is used, Action  Stack Overflow, there is a steady decline since the last two years. And then I was a  little bit like, okay, what is this actually about? But where is everybody? They are not  in Stack Overflow, but I can see everyone of you here. So what are you doing all day?  Why are you not on Stack Overflow? Where are you? Or have you already figured out how you  fix your apps? And this is why this is going down. I actually found that there are a lot  of other communities where people in the Ember world actually engage with each other. And  I find that probably the Slack community is one of the most notable examples of where  actually discourse happens in our community. And in Slack, actually, I had to look like  at some stats. We already have like over 11,500 members, which is quite a bit. I wasn't aware  of that. I only talked to a couple of these, so maybe I should check it out again. We have  over 160 public channels. This is also quite a lot. And this excludes all the private messages  and the private channels. And we also send over 2,700,000 messages. And this is why you  sometimes see this thing like the history is deleted because we have so many messages.  It's amazing to see that so much is going on. And I want to know what actually people  are doing all day in that. And also what kind of channels are there? 160 channels, what  do they all do? Of course, there are a couple of defaults that you already opt in when you  actually join the Ember community Slack. And they are like general or random and also like  the help channel that is very useful specifically for new people to the Ember community to actually  ask quick questions that they would otherwise use or carry over to Slack overflow and maybe  like just have them laying there for like three days. It's a very straightforward way, specifically  as people are from all over the world and can easily just jump in to answer the question.  And even if no one is online, at least like locks is online to actually give you an answer.  Also, we have a lot of like core and Dev channels like Dev Ember and Dev Ember CLI. We also  have like a couple of local channels. So if you're from any other kind of part of the  world than the US, you probably also find like maybe, I don't know, maybe a British channel  or maybe like a German channel or some kind of other community that you can engage with  either in your kind of like area or maybe like even in your native language. And also  we have a lot of add-on specific channels. So if you're using some add-on, you want to  interact with maintainers, you can easily do that. And last but not least, the biggest  chunk that we can see in the pie chart is called other fun stuff. And I just want to  have a look what this actually means like what kind of other channels are there. So as Melanie  already mentioned her talk, there's of course a topic, a accessibility channel and also  many other topic channels that you can find in this kind of area. Also we have the Women  in Ember channel that for example helps people to engage in community if they're like a  women developer and want to find out more about Ember. And also we have like channels  like Give RVG Blue a Beer, which is also quite useful I guess, right? I mean, that's  pretty straightforward. And just looking at the overall stats, we see that regarding the  number of weekly users that most of the users have over three-quarter, I actually kind of  like just there and just like hanging out and reading what's going on, maybe hanging  out in announcements or in help or general, just like checking out what's going on. And  one quarter is actually messaging and actually sending any kind of like questions or any  kind of like comments to other people. Also just looking at the most popular channels  and how they actually perform regarding messages, we can see the Help channel is still the  most popular one. Like most of the messages are still sent there and actually a lot of  this change is happening with a lot of like people that are new in the community, which  is actually a great way to reach new people in the Ember world. And also if you look at  the number of users of all time, we see that it actually kind of like evenly distributes  over the default channels that are already set up when you join the Ember community stack,  which also indicates that if you want to drive people in a certain direction, you want to  go like, oh, I actually would like that people could see this more. You could just set it  up as a default, I was thinking, right? But yeah, this is kind of like an interesting  point also to make. Like people just like stay in the channel then and then just go  like, yeah, I'm just going to check it out every now and then. And I was curious also  who talks the most. So I had a look at like the top five channels that have like the most  messages at all time, like since the community existed. And I could see Help is actually  quite, actually quite talkative per user, right? I wanted to know like who actually  talks the most, like how related to users, how many is it? And Help is quite good with  it, General also, Random, Ember Data are also quite a bit, but actually most chatty  is really team learning, right? And I'm actually not so contributing to that too much, so I'm  wondering who is that actually? And also if we look at the last 30 days and who is actually  talking a lot in these channels, you find that a couple of like the channels we already  mentioned are also there, team learning is also not too bad, but then we see that for  example in topic types we have a lot of activities actually going on. I was a bit curious what  this is about, like I don't know why in the past 30 days did something happen or what  is going on? So I had a look at Ember Observer again to actually find out if there's an add-on  or something that is related to the channel and also find Ember CL TypeScript to be there.  And interesting with that is also under the top 10 download at Ember Add-ons and also  kind of like has quite interesting download rate. If you're looking at the monthly numbers  you can also see that specifically in the last month it really skyrocketed a lot and  you also found out that it's mostly due to the fact that a lot of people are picking  it up more because recent releases actually implemented some major features that were  highly requested in the community and this also shows something very interesting I think  about the Ember community, especially if you look at the Stack Overflow trend data about  the TypeScript tag that a lot of people are actually curious about TypeScript. And I think  this actually brings back the point back home that it's actually cool to sometimes be just  a JavaScript developer who goes, yeah, this is actually pretty nitty-gritty. I really  like that. I like TypeScript in my application and this is a cool new thing that I want to  try out and I actually think like Add-ons are a great way to further this excitement  without having to lose the stability that we all cherish and value in the Ember framework.  Also lots of great ways for communication exists like the blog through the Ember Core  team and also newsletters like the Ember JS times through the Ember Learning team. Other  resources and other newsletters like for example Ember Weekly are also there and actually quite  popular with over 6,000 subscribers and with the Ember JS times with 1,100 subscribers we  can see a lot of people are actually interested in what is going on in the community and subscribe  to these newsletters. But I also wanted to know if there's more about that. I mean I  subscribed also to a lot of newsletters but what does it actually mean? Are people actually  reading that? Are they actually doing anything with the newsletter? And had a lot of more  insight into the Ember JS times specifically. And here for example you can see that first  of all subscriber count kind of like elevated over time kind of steadily until the 1,100  mark that we are currently at. And also if you are looking at engagement rates we actually  also find kind of like striking numbers with an average of 30% engagement rate which is  quite a bit. I don't know if you ever worked in marketing but this is not too bad. And last  but not least I also wanted to have a look at what for example the spike that we saw  earlier in the engagement rate is about. And I had a look at this and then I was like oh  okay, yeah right, we sent out the survey. We were just like ask people can you answer  this one question survey, 30 seconds or something. And I was a bit like I don't know if people  really pick up on that. Will they really do that? But actually in fact over 60% of people  engage with that. And I was like oh this is really cute. This is really nice of you. I  really appreciate this. And I think this also really nicely shows that there is actually  a lot of ways that you can communicate with people in the community and people are really  appreciated about this information and also try to give a bit back. And this is also what  I really love about the Ember community. It's just like very cozy. So with that said I also  want to have a quick look on what is actually happening offline and not only online. With  over 68 meetup groups worldwide and also a lot of international conferences like Ember  Fest also Ember Camp London and specifically EmberConf where we are here right now. I think  there is a great way for us to also engage face to face with the people we already meet  online on a daily basis. And also believe that specifically this personal interactions  and these events so we can actually see each other as the very human beings that we are  are also a very great way for us to actually broaden the community. And I believe this is  actually a pretty big point for us as a group as a Emberista subculture to further the stability  and also to improve the community in itself. And here I also want to highlight another  project that is part of the Ember community. The Ember Women Help Me Win project that for  example tries to further leverage the diversity in the community and tries to support women  developers to not only be part of the community but also to support them in speaking gigs  and also trying to get the message across. And I believe women helping women is probably  one of these great means that also are a reason for me actually currently being here. And  I would like to see many more of these projects that try to create diversity in our community  to emerge to actually further grow our community as ourselves and also hopefully to inspire  many other JavaScript subcultures to do something very similar to make it a better place in  the technology community. And with that said, I just want to sum up what my findings were  when I set out to actually find more out about the Emberista subculture. First of all, I  found that the Emberista subculture is very inspiring to many other subcultures and this  is actually a really great thing. And I don't want it to change. I actually wanted to be  distinct from other subcultures at all times, at least a bit, to kind of like create something  new that can also be leveraged by other people. Also, I want to see more efforts to actually  further excitement. And I think the atom culture but also a lot of like cool new features that  we saw in the keynote are a great way to actually achieve that. Also, I think that leveraging  communication is a great means to actually make it more efficient to make people understand  the community what is going on. And I think we are already in a great way to do that.  And broadening the community, actually approving the overall being of the community is a great  aspect to actually make it more stable. But finally, it's probably all about kind of like  being awesome, staying awesome. And I'm very happy that it has been so far. So with that  said, thank you very much and have a great time at EmberConf.  Thank you.
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