What happens when users don’t have fast phones, reliable internet, or prior digital experience?

In this talk, I’ll share practical lessons from building fintech and marketplace UIs for users in emerging markets—where the norm is slow networks, entry-level devices, and first-time internet users. These experiences have shaped a frontend philosophy rooted in empathy, performance, and accessibility.

You’ll learn actionable strategies for: • Designing interfaces that work on unstable connections • Optimizing frontend performance for outdated hardware • Simplifying UX for low-literacy and new-to-digital users • Building trust through thoughtful onboarding • Implementing graceful degradation and offline resilience

These insights are framework-agnostic but deeply relevant to anyone working on inclusive web applications, whether you use Ember or not.

Roosevelt Elias

A visionary solutions architect, product strategist, technology entrepreneur, and founder of Payble, a next-generation product technology company focused on solving complex economic and digital inclusion challenges for micro and small businesses across Africa and globally.

Trying to integrate multiple frameworks can be a daunting prospect. There are a number of technologies that people have used in the past such as web-components, micro-frontends, etc. but we’re not living in the past. The future of this integration could be all frameworks living together in harmony with the Signals proposal to TC39, but we’re not living in the future yet. This talk will be diving into what is possible today when wanting to integrate frameworks, giving some examples, and showing how the various frameworks might interplay.

Nick Schot

Long time Ember.js developer from The Netherlands. Working at Mainmatter. Always interested in anything involving a lot of tinkering including but not limited to: animations, model railways, micro controllers & coffee.

When WarpDrive (Universal EmberData) was announced, we didn't just establish a new data paradigm—we commissioned a starship capable of boldly going where no framework has gone before. Our five-year mission: to work equally well with or without any framework, with or without a DOM, in any JS runtime, with standard build tools, and even with any version of Ember.

Join us as we explore what it truly means to build a Polaris Application — one that can navigate by the North Star of stability while maintaining the agility to explore strange new APIs, seek out new build tools and development paradigms, and boldly ship where no developer has shipped before.

Chris Thoburn (aka. runspired)

Chris is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at AuditBoard and long-term EmberData/WarpDrive team member. He’s also a mountain/ultra/trail runner.

Leading a team of engineers and maintaining a live-product means staying highly alert, high-pressure situations, making plenty decisions and while also guiding and supporting peers. There is rewarding tasks but also annoying ones. Let’s turn some of the annoying into rewarding ones.

1) The journey no developer likes or wants: Pitching a technical initiative to upper management. It’s a journey of being misunderstood, seeing technical improvements and benefits for your team being denied, while drowning in politics.

2) Maintaining your application, ensuring all aspects of operating a production app are addressed and handled can be overwhelming.

This talk aims to bring piece to these aspects. Following the idea to treat your app as a city and address the needs to keep it operable, maintainable and evolving. Being able to quickly communicate your ideas to upper management as well as fellow engineers speeds up your own workflow providing a framework for making good, better and quicker decisions.

Thomas Gossmann

Unicyclist. Artist. Developer.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are changing how we think about engineering—but integrating them meaningfully into a real Ember workflow requires more than just calling an API.

In this talk, we’ll start with a high-level explanation of how LLMs work, including tokens, attention, and context windows. Then, I’ll show how I’ve built a practical, low-friction GenAI assistant—Agent Tomster—that writes Ember code, documentation, and even tests by using tools like Claude, Cline, RooCode, and internal memory banks that scrape and organize my app’s existing codebase and docs.

Alon Bukai

Alon Bukai is a 34-year-old Staff UI Engineering Architect at CrowdStrike based in Israel. With around a decade of experience building Ember applications, Alon has been deeply involved in the Ember community as a former Ember Addon Developer and former Ember Weekly Editor. Balancing a career in cutting-edge UI engineering with a vibrant home life, Alon is married with a daughter and a dog, continually striving to innovate while nurturing his personal passions.

Every developer has a list of reasons why important tech work never gets done—too many meetings, no focus time, feature work always taking priority. But here’s the truth: if you want to drive meaningful change, you have to stop waiting for permission and start making it happen. Think about that Ember upgrade or refactor that keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the backlog…

In this talk, we’ll cut through the excuses and explore how to build a rock-solid case for your tech initiatives by shifting the focus from developer pain points to real business and customer impact. From managing your time effectively, leveraging your colleagues and community and other tactics to get things moving.

Most importantly, I’ll share some practical strategies to engage your manager—not with complaints, but with conviction—and the confidence to push forward, even when the system isn’t designed to make it easy.

Aoife Hannigan

I’m Aoife! I’m the Director of Engineering at Phorest, I feel like an imposter now at EmberFest since I’m no longer hands-on, but I promise I was, and always will be at heart, an Ember dev! I’m from Dublin, Ireland. Lover of food, travel and good craic.

Over the past two years, Ember has transformed into a modern future-proof framework using the latest tools in the ecosystem. Lightning-fast rebuilds, intuitive single-file components, and native TypeScript support... We'll present you what technologies modern Ember relies on and how to adopt them as soon as possible.

Then we'll pull back the curtain on the Ember Initiative: the new funding model behind Ember's rapid evolution. We'll tell you everything about the Initiative, what kind of hard problems it solves for the community, and how to join it!

Chris Manson

Senior Developer @mainmatter.com. @emberjs.com Core Learning and Tooling Team member. Created Empress http://github.com/empress. Created Lint to the Future https://github.com/mansona/lint-to-the-future. Big fan of Open Source!

Marine Dunstetter

Senior Developer @mainmatter.com. Frontend developer most of the time, but also illustrator, indie writer (L'Académie des Renards), and pragmatic dreamer with cats and a biodiversity-friendly garden.

TBA

Chris Thoburn (aka. runspired)

Chris is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at AuditBoard and long-term EmberData/WarpDrive team member. He’s also a mountain/ultra/trail runner.