Yehuda Katz on Thinking Long Term about Experimentation vs. Fragmentation in OSS

Frontend First

Yehuda Katz joins Sam to talk about the strategies Ember's developed to keep the majority of the community on recent versions of the framework for more than 8 years. He talks about lessons learned from the 1.13 upgrade, how the core team thinks about API experimentation vs. community fragmentation, and the approach Octane is taking to enable frontend developers that know HTML and CSS to ship interactive sites with Ember.

Topics include:

- 5:15 – What experiences led Ember to prioritize bringing the entire community along for upgrades and changes to the programming model

- 21:22 – Why open source libraries shouldn't couple breaking changes to conceptual changes

- 31:30 – How to think about the tradeoff between fragmentation and experimentation

- 40:00 – How Ember is exposing more low-level primitives while still emphasizing its higher-level APIs

- 45:01 – What mattered to Yehuda when he became a programmer, and how he's bringing that to the Ember community

- 1:02:20 – Why Octane embraces HTML

- 1:12:04 – What type of developer Octane targets

- 1:24:22 – What the modern version of Rails' blog in 15 minutes could look like

Links:

- [Together: The Merb Story](https://yehudakatz.com/2020/02/19/together-the-merb-story/), Yehuda Katz

- ["We're the Together Framework"](https://yehudakatz.com/2020/03/09/the-together-framework/), Yehuda Katz

- [Coronavirus will also cause a loneliness epidemic](https://www.vox.com/2020/3/12/21173938/coronavirus-covid-19-social-distancing-elderly-epidemic-isolation-quarantine)