Brian Ball

Recent Articles

Introducing the Professional Development Canvas

It is a developed skill to take all the different things in my life and answer two questions, “What should I learn next,” and “How am I going to learn it.”  I’ve had twenty years to figure out how to self-direct my learning.  In addition, I’ve had some semi-professional experience in developing my training materials […]
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GraphViz – A Tool You Aren’t Using, but Should

Recently, we had a book club where we read the Mikado Method, a process of handling large scale rearchitecting via refactors on the Master Branch without adversely impacting new features. One of the techniques that make up the method is visualizing the refactoring plan as a digraph of dependent steps. But as much as I […]
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I Want to be the One in Control

It’s all about time. SEP, like most organizations, lives and dies by time sheets. Our time sheets are two weeks long. Each entry has a start time, a project code, a description, and a duration. Easy enough, but what does that have to do with EmberJS? To Quote Miss Jackson, “I Want to be the […]
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A Template for Lunches

If you want to show anything on your page, you’re going to have to write a template. A template is the html to display on each page view. And if you use resources, they nest! Ember, by default, uses the Handlebars template engine. Lunchtime! It’s a Friday and I want ribs for lunch. But I […]
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A Picture is Worth 1000 Lies

Last week, I wrote about Routing in EmberJS. And I kinda lied a bit. I laid out the Pokédex route like this … App.router.map(function(){ this.route("pokedex", {path: ‘/pokedex/:poke_id’}); }); That’s probably the wrong choice, but I made it for Pedagogical reasons. I regret nothing, but we are going to play with the routes of an example […]
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Getting from Here to There

Where do we go from here? We begin with the Url. The history of the web is based around the URL and our ability to transition from one url to another. Ember is built around the Url. You are a Web Developer if you build apps with Urls – Tom Dale Every view we want […]
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Rise of the Tetrad

Ember has about six concepts that once you understand a bit will help you unlock the documentation and figure out how to develop your site. I have written before about not needing to fully understand ember before working on a project, but once you start getting your feet under you and need to branch out. […]
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The Ember Path

There was a recent blog post by Rob Conery about learning EmberJs by just flinging yourself at it. That was something that kind of resonated with me. I’ve been trying to understand EmberJS for a while, but I wasn’t getting it. I wasn’t feeling confident enough to actually start a project and get it right. […]
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A quick note on EmberJs and ReactiveJS

I tweeted yesterday that I was having trouble with EmberJS and ReactiveJS integration. I’m hip-deep in an emberjs app and I can’t get my canvas to pump events through rxjs… — Brian J Ball (@Myotherpants) June 3, 2014 Well, I figured it out! With some help from the fine ReactiveX folks. The long story short […]
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