This Week’s Program: Mar 21 - Mar 25

Had an off-week this week. Decided to take a step away from sonic-sketches for a bit to work on another project, this one closed-source. I decided to use Ember for it.

This week has been mostly about learning how Ember works, scratching out a few of the tutorials, and getting my Emacs set-up for “ambitious” JavaScript development.

The bulk of commits this week are in my emacs.d configuration. It seems like the preferred community way of approaching Ember, or any other sort of modern JS project, is with js2-mode and web-mode. I struggled with js2-mode’s indentation configuration, which serves as another reminder why Lisp is great. js2 also has this kind of on-the-fly syntax checking which I found kind of annoying, especially when Flycheck does this really well.

The JavaScript community’s ecosystem was under a fair bit of scrutiny this week and I’d rather not pile on, but I was certainly weary of the toolchain heroics that are necessary to get started in a meaningful way (npm, Babel, eslint, etc.). To be fair that curve is par for the course for any major language development.

The major change in my Emacs set up was this bit of elisp:

(setq create-lockfiles nil)

Emacs Lockfiles were causing pain with ember-cli’s file watching/rebuilding. I just turned them off. Probably will have ramifications down the line.

So far I think Ember is pretty good.

– Mark