For those who don’t know Ember.js: It’s a JavaScript framework to create ambitious web applications (that’s what http://emberjs.com/ says). It’s main competitor would be AngularJS. But there are a couple of different frameworks which all try to get a big piece of the cake.

I’m not diving into the JavaScript framework religious war but I’d like to paint two very different scenarios of Ember.

Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale the inventors of Ember at EmberConf 2015

Best Case Scenario

Let’s assume Ember was the very best framework in the world. Unfortunately in this scenario it had little documentation which was outdated most of the times and very few trainers (which by the way were all US based). In this scenario even the best framework in the world wouldn’t get much traction.

Worst Case Scenario

Let’s assume Ember was the worst framework in the world. Extremly buggy and not performant at all. But in this scenario it would have excelent documentation and trainers all over the world who’d spead the word and teach it to beginners. In this scenario even a bad framework would become very populare.

It doesn’t take a high IQ to sense the direction of my argumentation.

Current State of Training

The headline gives away that I think that Ember is a great piece of software but it lacks a training community. I went to the first official Ember training by the creators of Ember Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale in Boston in April 2013 which was mediocre. I went to “TRAINING B: EMBER CLI, UP AND RUNNING” before this year’s EmberConf which was done by The Frontside. That was one of the worst trainings I’ve ever attended. I did the online Ember training by CodeSchool and really liked it. It did have a couple of bugs but over all it is well worth the money. Unfortuantly it doesn’t cover Ember CLI. Shawn Dumas of Google told me that he went twice to the Ember training of Erik Bryn because it was so good. I haven’t tested that one myself because I live in Germany and any training in the US comes with a heavy price tag for me.

There is no official training material. No certification precedure. No way you can add a “Ember 2nd Level Developer Certificate” to your CV.

Documentation

Anyone who visits http://emberjs.com/ the first time and browses to the documentation gets the impression that it should be easy to learn. But that is not the case if you are not already a brilliant JavaScript developer who happens to attend every single Ember Meetup on the US west coast.

Tomster

And for those poor people who come from the “JavaScript sprinkles” copy and paste world: You are out of luck! Because for those the very first step is too steep already. Have a look:

npm install -g ember-cli

ember new my-app

You don’t know what npm is? Than you are not worthy of an easy entry into the wonderful world of Ember!

Let’s assume you have npm and Ember CLI installed and would like to start with a simple “Hello World!” program. You’re out of luck again. :-(

But you can find a nice Ember example on http://todomvc.com/. And if you really want to learn Ember you should be able to invest a couple of weeks to dig through this code and use http://stackoverflow.com/ for any arising problem. And thankfully there is a Slack for you too: https://embercommunity.slack.com/

It is not impossible to learn Ember by yourself if you have an IQ of less than 130. But it is very hard. The core team is super happy that ES6 will solve all problems of the future but doesn’t realize that the normal people have totally different problems.

The Training Eco System

I’ve been doing IT training and writing books (e.g. Ruby on Rails 4.2 for Autodidacts) for some 20 years. With that background I know that it takes a couple of weeks to create a good 2–3 day beginners training. And truth be told it takes about two trainings to iron out the major bugs and logical errors. After that initial investment trainings are easy money. You do optimize them regulary but you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. At least not until the next major release of a given software. But obviously people don’t book trainings for out of date software.

In my humble opinion the worst trainers are those who are very good programmers and think because of their pure knowledge of the material they can wing it with live coding. Big mistake! Every student wants good training material to take away and study afterword. They are happy to meet that cool guy who has a million Twitter followers but at the end of the day they want to learn Ember and not his/her cool vim power tools.

The Ember core team releases a new version every 6 weeks. That is super cool for all the heavy duty Ember users but it is a night mare for anybody who writes books or offers trainings.

And let me emphasize my major point again: Many people want to learn Ember but they start at a very basic level and need a step by step guide which is up to date. Currently I think the Ember community loses too many of those curious beginners.

BTW: Yesterday a fellow Ember developer told me: “I’d be happy if the Guid/API would fully keep up with releases, training would be icing on the cake.”

The Solution

Enough whining. I believe that there are a lot talented trainers out there who would love to make a living by giving Ember 101 courses if they’d get up to date training materials. Those trainers would be valuable multiplicators.

I’m talking about beginner’s trainings! There will always be plenty of room for advanced trainings by Ember rock stars.

I’m suggesting an Ember Training Community which creates official training material and offers a certification process. Each student should be listed with his/her certification level on the Ember page to make it easier for them to prove their achievements.

Each trainer would have to participate in a train the trainer program which could be done once a year at EmberConf. All trainings should have a fixed price and a percentage of that price should be transferred to some legal entity which takes care that the training material gets updated with every new release.

There should be a “light version” which might even be free for Meetups all over the world.

Long Term Goals

Training material in different languages would be great. It’s unbelivable how many people do not speak English.

Online training. I like the http://codeschool.com/ way of offering trainings. Having such a learning plattform would be fantastic. But I do realize the unlikeliness of this because it is so much work.

Short Term Goals

Create a group of people who want to help to create a training community and who are willing to invest time to write training material. I guess an initial kick off meeting would ease things and make it easier to get to first base.

I’m aware of the magnitude of such an endeavour. I’m not in a position to go ahead and start it myself. Language being one problem. Funding an other. I’m using this post to rise awareness of the problem and hope that we’ll find a solution for it.

Please do send me feedback: