Why Intercom supports Embroider Initiative to update Ember

Intercom has worked with Ember for over 9 years, and we have evolved and grown together during that time.

We have about 150 engineers working on our core application, and we ship into production hundreds of times a week, so Ember's hard-nosed, "batteries included" nature works well for us. We rely on Ember to enable our nearly 30 product development teams to quickly deliver high-quality solutions to our customers.

Embroider is Ember's next-generation build system. It's basically a bridge that will allow Ember to use modern JS ecosystem building tools like Vite or Turbopack. This allows the Ember community to benefit from the collective skills of the entire JS community and focus their efforts on the core functionality of the differencing framework.

Adopt embroidery

One of the main practical reasons we're adopting Embroider is that our build speeds with the existing classic ember-cli build system are quite slow. For example, local build refresh times can average 15 seconds, multiplied by the number of builds per day for all of our engineers. That's north of the 2,400 hours our engineers spend each year waiting for their local development environment to cool off! With Embroider, we plan to reduce this to an average of 1s, which could save us around 2,000 hours per year and reap the benefits of instant feedback.

"We believe Embroider will ensure that Embroider remains an attractive option for new businesses, and that our community can continue to thrive"

We have been working to adopt Embroider for the past two years. Although we got our main app running earlier this year, Embroider is still in development and unfortunately for a large app like ours, it's not quite ready for production.

Essentially, by enabling Ember to run on modern JS build tools, we believe Embroider will ensure that Embroider remains an attractive option for new businesses, and that our community can continue to thrive.

The embroidery initiative

That's why we support the Embroider initiative.

Embroider has been in development for four years and has been worked on by a small group of contributors in their spare time. The goal of the initiative is to pick up the momentum of Embroider's development, working to make it the default build tool for Ember in the near term. A number of companies have come together to fund development time dedicated to the project for a team of engineers, as well as to create resources to make it easier for others to contribute.

It's run by web engineering consultancy Mainmatter in conjunction with the Ember community, and Intercom is just one of many sponsors already signed up. (Read more about our involvement in this interview with Mainmatter Managing Director Marco Otte-Witte.)

Open source support

Ember is open source software, maintained by a small community of passionate volunteers. It has meant a lot to us over the past decade, and it is important that we invest in the community to repay that and to ensure that we can continue to grow together over the next nine years.

“Collaborative open source projects like this largely encapsulate the spirit of innovation and community that inspires us here at Intercom”

The Embroider initiative and our sponsorships of EmberConf, EmberFest and EmberEurope are some of the ways we can do this.

Collaborative open source projects like this largely encapsulate the spirit of innovation and community that inspires us at Intercom. We are incredibly honored and excited to play our part in Ember's next chapter.

If you want to learn more or get involved, contact our friends at Mainmatter.