The Rock & Roll with Ember band - Ben Borowski
20 November 2020
The "Rock & Roll with Ember band" interview series introduces readers of the similarly titled book. They tell us about how they got acquainted with the framework, how they learned it, what they use it for, and share a few more details about the non-tech related side of their lives. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.
Could you introduce yourself in a few sentences?
I'm Ben Borowski. I am a designer, developer, and firefighter. I've been making apps, games, and websites since about 2005.
When and how did your Ember journey begin? How did you learn about the framework?
I began with Ember just prior to 1.x in around 2014. I was building a new platform doki.io, starting with Angular 1. I was really confused by it and when I discovered Ember, it was a breath of fresh air, being immediately familar since I had a background in Ruby on Rails.
How did reading the Rock & Roll with Ember book help you? Can you recall something that you learned from it?
I read RaRwE and it got me over some confusing application design humps. I'd never made an SPA before, and it was super helpful to build an app from end-to-end to learn.
I also read version 3 of the book when I returned to Ember after some time away from the framework. In this case, it served as a great refresher and introduction to concepts I had yet to explore such as glimmer and angle-bracket components.
What Ember feature/RFC/etc. are you most excited about?
Code-spliting, as always.
That and the @use RFC.
Other than reading the book, how did you learn to “speak" Ember?
The Ember CLI 101 book.
I also ran the Ember meetup group when I lived in Vancouver, BC. Got to learn alongside lots of great folks.
Are there any (side-)projects that you’ve built in Ember? What is it about?
Were there any challenges or stumbling blocks while you were building your app?
Typically Ember upgrades were the most challenging for me. I also struggle with testing. On the whole, I find testing with javascript quite much more difficult than something like Ruby.
How much time do you have to work on that project?
About a day a week these days.
What do you like to do in your free time?
Firefighting and learning how to work on cars. Video games.
If people would like to follow you (or your project), where can they do so?
If you've read the book, and would like to give a similar interview, please drop me a line at rarwe-book@balinterdi.com.
If you'd like to join the Rock & Roll with Ember band, check out the book of the same name to learn Ember (and be part of a band).
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