Ħelow Emberistas! 🐹

Read either on the Ember blog or in our e-mail newsletter what has been going on in Emberland this week.

This week we have a fresh RFC for modifying your HTML elements 🛠 for you, as well as long-awaited async news from Ember Data 🕓, an empowering podcast session ❤️ and truthful updates for ember-truth-helpers! Check it out ✨

A new Request for Comments (RFC) might bring new life to your HTML tags: The proposal for Modifiers presents a possible future API for components in Ember which allows to add custom behaviour, like event listeners or styles, to DOM nodes in your components. Reliable access to DOM nodes will be guaranteed by the means of these element modifiers, alleviating issues with the outerHTML semantics mentioned in the this.bounds RFC which proposed a new way of accessing the root element of future Ember components.

This RFC is a successor of the previous RFC#112: Element Modifiers and aims to bring many of the previously mentioned ideas back into discussion.

Be sure to read the original proposal over at Github and share your thoughts and questions in the comments for the RFC's pull request.

I'm willing to wait for it 🎶

A new PR has been merged to Ember Data that improves your use of async ... await while simultaneously detecting asynchronous test leaks in their data layer.

The feature works in non-production environments and they made sure that the test-waiter does not cause waiting by default in order to prevent breaking any apps that upgrade their version of Ember Data.

This new feature comes with two feature flags store.shouldTrackAsyncRequests and store.generateStackTracesForTrackedRequests. To learn all about them and some more information on this new feature, be sure to check out the pull request.

Podcast: Melanie Sumner on empowering JavaScript engineers 💪

This week @samselikoff interviewed Ember Core team member Melanie Sumner (@MelSumner) for The EmberMap Podcast. Melanie talked about her path from getting starting making Ember accessible to now being a leader in the Ember community as a core team member. Ember, for Melanie, was one of the first times in tech where she felt welcome. This is in huge part because of the welcoming Ember community

Melanie talked about empowering other people to feel included. This, to her, was the key to scaling yourself since you can only do so much as an individual. Inclusion to get other people involved will effectively create “clones” of yourself. This is how she participates in a vision that is shared by helping create a community.

Melanie mentioned how she practices Servant Leadership which she described as “not asking anyone to do something that I wouldn’t do myself.” This goes with the ethos Ember represents which is to invest in the long term by working with others so that they may feel welcome and contribute back into the community.

Sam and Melanie then talked about the native accessibility story for Ember going through the ARIA spec and seeing if it makes sense to implement it in Ember. There are loads of opportunities here as even having a modal or select dropdown be both accessible and customizable would be a huge leap for web developers. Having that built into Ember by default will be a game changer.

Click the links below watch the full interview:

• 🎥 EmberMap
• 🎙️ iTunes
• 📺 YouTube

Ember-Truth-Helpers was updated 🙌

Ember-truth-helpers is an Ember addon that provides helpers for truth logic in if and unless statements. As of version v2.1.0, @jamesarosen and @jmurphyau added the is-empty helper to the library. 🎉 This will make our lives easier when checking for empty values in our templates.

You can take a closer look at the change here. 👀

Contributors' Corner

This week we'd like to thank @tomdale, @smfoote, @acorncom, @Alonski, @amyrlam, @chrisrng, @Mi6u3l, @kennethlarsen, @jessica-jordan, @MelSumner, @tylerturdenpants, @runspired, @nummi, @vladucu, @stefanpenner, @SparshithNR, @dcyriller, @cyk, @kategengler, @samselikoff and @miguelcobain for their contributions to Ember and related repositories 💖!

Got a question? Ask Readers' Questions! 🤓

Want to write for the Ember Times? Have a suggestion for next week's issue? Join us at #topic-embertimes on Slack or tweet us @embertimes on Twitter.

That's another wrap! ✨

Be kind,

Chris Ng, Miguel Braga Gomes, Amy Lam, Alon Bukai, Ryan Mark, Kenneth Larsen, Jessica Jordan, Ricardo Mendes and the Learning Team