Many people have written blog posts for #EmberJS2019 about where they want to see Ember headed in the next year or so. I'll add only one item of my own, since there are already many ideas in the pot. I believe we need to shift our mentality a bit.

The Making Of Conventions Conventions come out of many failed experiments that have been run on real use cases, i.e. production apps. The Ember community loves conventions and cares about productivity, which unfortunately comes with a price, staying on the happy-path without the needed experimentation required for new conventions.

For the pit-of-incoherence to be fruitful and push us up the hilltop-of-coherence, we as developers need to put ourselves out there and learn some lessons off the happy-path. It wont be easy, because it will cost us time, money, and failure. I think this step is especially hard for Ember developers because of the ethos that Ember has built.

Fragmentation Results Inevitably fragmentation will occur. Some people might take their experiments too far, or abandon them. Other experiments might fail. Yes these are risks that exist, but should not stop us. The goal is to take the best fragments and build them up into a beautiful mosaic.

At the end, when we reach the hilltop-of-coherence, some fragments will be left in the valley, maybe most of them. We do after all need alternatives and different views to see the flaws in our designs. Let's not hold on too tightly to our ideas and code, but focus on unity out of our individual ideas.

A Greater Danger If we don't take up the cause to experiment for the greater good of the community, for building it up, then we'll just keep chasing the competition instead of building those conventions that can only be done by experimentation and failure. Ember will essentially become obsolete as it chases the other frameworks.

This doesn't mean that we don't learn from the wider web community or that we don't adopt great ideas, but it does mean that we have our beliefs, our "why", and we should filter all great ideas through that "why". Here's to a year of experimentation and uniting in greater focus and vision as the Ember community.