Why Intercom is supporting the Embroider Initiative to update Ember

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

We have about 150 engineers working on our main app, and we ship to production hundreds of times a week, so Ember’s opinionated and “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 – at its core it is a bridge that will allow Ember to use modern JS ecosystem build tools such as Vite or Turbopack. That lets the Ember community benefit from the collective skills of the whole JS community and focus its efforts on the core differentiating framework functionality.

Adopting Embroider

One of the main practical reasons we are 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 15s, multiplied by the number of builds a day across all of our engineers. That’s north of 2,400 hours our engineers spend every year waiting for their local dev environment to refresh! With Embroider we expect to shave that down to a 1s average, potentially saving us ~2,000 hours a year and unlocking the benefits of instant feedback.

“We believe Embroider will ensure Ember remains an attractive option for new companies, and so our community can continue to thrive”

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

Crucially, by enabling Ember to run on modern JS build tooling, we believe Embroider will ensure Ember remains an attractive option for new companies, and so our community can continue to thrive.

The Embroider Initiative

That’s why we are backing 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 initiative’s aim is to pick up the momentum of Embroider’s development, striving to make it the default build tool for Ember in the short term. A number of companies have come together to fund dedicated development time on the project for an engineering team, as well as creating resources to make it easier for others to contribute.

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

Supporting open-source

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

“Collaborative open-source projects like this encapsulate so much of 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 small ways we can do that.

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

If you want to know more, or get involved, reach out to our friends at Mainmatter.