The Rock & Roll with Ember band - Michal Bryxí

15 November 2024

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?

Hi, I'm Michal Bryxí, or Míša. You might know me from EmberJS Discord, conferences or just the internet space. I'm quite a keen advocate of good UX, not blaming users for the faults of the IT industry and spending my time in any other way than at the computer.

Which part of the world are you from?

Originally I come from Czechia, but I've been living in UK for ~7 years and now I'm based in Interlaken - Switzerland.

When and how did your Ember journey begin? How did you learn about the framework?

Because I used Puppet (configuration management software) in my previous company, I thought it would be cool to start working for Puppet (the company). After I started they told me that they actually need me on some frontend project and I will be working with something called Ember.

Right after I started, the company shipped me to Portland to attend EmberConf (2016). On the long way in the plane I was hacking away on what would become my biggest project using Ruby on Rails. But since it was a very long flight I thought I should give Ember a try to see if I can use it for fun projects & learn something for work.

It was a perfect match and I'm happy to report that said app is still running without any major rewrite ever since.

How did reading the Rock & Roll with Ember book help you? Can you recall something that you learned from it?

The basics. I'm not very patient person and I tend to jump from thing to thing when building something, often times missing a lot of crucial details in doing so. Rock & Roll with Ember gives the end to end story and shows all the little pieces that come into play when building EmberJS applications.

Other than reading the book, how did you learn to “speak" Ember?

Projects, projects, projects. I maintain a few tiny addons which helped me understand the v2 addon evolution. I have tons of apps around that have their quirks and specifics. For myself, I deeply believe that I could not be where I am without working on "my" stuff outside the regular "work time".

What Ember feature/RFC/etc. are you most excited about?

This changes all the time to be honest. But I'm super happy that ember-data is getting a big overhaul as I consider it the most important part for all my projects. Dropping custom build story and plugging into the vite world sounds super promising. And for the future I'm curious about dropping controllers and overhaul of the routing system.

Is there something you’d like to see covered or explained in more detail in the book?

Short answer: Ember Data. I don't consider building an UI that displays stuff and reacts to user inputs that hard. As you can (mostly) dictate all the bits and pieces. But state mutation, persistence, updates ... that's something where a lot of things can go sideways.

Are there any (side-)projects that you’ve built in Ember? What is it (are they) about?

• E2E Beauty Salon management solution (hello Phorest :)). I've been working on it on and off for over a decade and it's still going strong.
• Private location tracking visualisation tool. This was built in ~two weekends.
• POC frontend replacement for live winds tracking. I hope to replace the original Angular app; this also probably took me ~2 weekends.

Were there any challenges or stumbling blocks while you were building your app(s)?

The usual:

• Documentation
  • Sometimes things are missing
  • Sometimes links within the docs are broken
  • Sometimes search in the docs is not working
  • Sometimes you stumble upon DenverCoder9 comment
• Addons
  • There are quite a few that used to work, but are deteoriating now
  • Some addons have quite a list of PRs from folks, but nobody merges them for year(s)
• NullVoxPopulli is on vacation
  • Then, I think, we all feel like our productivity goes down

What do you like to do in your free time?

Trail running & paragliding

If people would like to follow you (or your project), where can they do so?

Right now I'm probably most active on my Mastodon

Is there something else you’d like to say?

I love folks from around EmberJS community. The love, patience, thoughtfulness and general community vibe. You are the best!

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).