Olá Emberistas! 🐹

This week we're sharing news about the 🆕 Ember community Discord chat 💬, some fresh 🥑 RFCs, the State of JavaScript 2018 Survey 📝, Ember Data Help Wanted 🏗, and welcoming new Learning Team members 👋!

Everyone's Moved! 📦 Meet Your Ember 🐹 Friends on Discord 🗣

It's done! 👌 The community chat has finally moved over to Discord! Even more modern than IRC and ICQ combined, you can now chat with other Emberistas from all around the globe in many different topic channels with unlimited message history 💌✨.

Join today and be sure to get setup as described in the #setup-profile channel. To start chatting, request the community-member role in #discord-server-admin, so the undaunted org admins can make sure THAT YOU ARE NOT A BOT BUT A REAL HUMAN LIKE US HA-HA 🤖.

A Public Factory 🏭 for Your Models

A brand-new 🔥 Request For Comments (RFC) makes addon authors' and Ember power users' 💪 hearts ♡ leap for joy: The previously deprecated Ember Data store method modelFactoryFor is making its comeback as an official, public API. This new public method will allow users to provide any kind of ModelClass (and not only the default DS.Model provided by Ember Data) to applications if needed.

Curious? Read the full proposal and leave your questions and suggestions in the comments below!

State of JavaScript 2018 Survey Is Here Again 🗳️

"Just like [the holidays] or the flu, the State of JavaScript survey comes back around every year. But unlike these, it’s something to actually look forward to!" - Sacha Greif

State of JavaScript is the yearly JavaScript survey that aims to gauge the whole JavaScript community across all frameworks, libraries, regional location and more. It tries to find out with which technologies developers are most happy with as well as which technologies are coming up and becoming popular in JavaScript.

Last year there were over 20,000 entries and while Ember was known by most, many either didn't want to learn it or had used it in the past and didn't want to again. With all of the improvements to Ember these past few years, we can do better!

So go and fill out the survey and show your support for Ember in 2018! Make your voice heard! 📣

Check out the Twitter or Medium post to learn more.

🎉 Take the survey! 🎉

Element Modifier RFCs ⚛️

Ember Core Team member @chadhietala proposed 2 RFCs around Element Modifiers – one for the Modifier Manager and the other for the Element Modifier itself.

Element Modifiers provide stable access of the DOM node they are installed on. Unlike a component, there is no template/layout for an element modifier. Unlike a helper, an element modifier does not return a value. An element modifier is invoked in "element space". This is the space between < and > opening an HTML tag.

Here is an example of the element modifier syntax in action:

<button {{effect 'fade-in'}}>Save</button>

The Modifier Manager RFC proposes to add a low level primitive for defining an element modifier which is responsible for coordinating the lifecycle events that occurs when invoking, installing and updating an element modifier. Most app developers would not need interact with the manager but it would allow the community to experiment with and iterate on this API outside of the core framework.

See more in the respective RFCs for Element Modifier and Modifier Manager.

Even More Help Wanted 🚧 on Ember Data

We talked about contributing to Ember Data last week. This week there are even more ways to get involved! Help @runspired ship ember-data/json-api-validator. He writes that this addon will enable you to write clearer normalization tests, catch those pesky and usually silent formatting issues, and leave you with actionable errors instead of head-scratching ones! Run the test suite or check out some of the repo issues here.

New Learning Team Members 😄

The Ember Learning Core Team is pleased to announce two new members. @mansona and @amyrlam have both been working for over a year to make Ember more accessible to contributors. Can’t wait to see what they get up to next!

Contributors' Corner

This week we'd like to thank @locks, @mike-north, @IzzatN, @rwwagner90, @kennethlarsen, @amyrlam, @jessica-jordan, @dcyriller, @nathanhammond, @runspired, @nlfurniss, @thorsteinsson, @pzuraq, @Gaurav0, @rwjblue, @twokul, @dnalagatla, @kategengler, @ryanto, @22a, @Kerrick, @ppcano, @thereR4lights and @dependabot[bot] 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 #support-ember-times on the Ember Community Discord or ping us @embertimes on Twitter.

That's another wrap! ✨

Be kind,

Alon Bukai, Chris Ng, Amy Lam, Ryan Mark, Jessica Jordan and the Learning Team