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A lot has happened this year, for all of us in this world. This year, we decided instead of just focusing on us, we would take this time to reflect on our year by also highlighting charities that we support. We invite you to read about our reflections on 2015, our hopes for 2016, and the charities we care about.

The folks over at PSD to WordPress reached out to ask about thoughts on CSS frameworks. Brian had a few words to share to their roundup.

A few weeks back I saw this article from Jared Spool in my twitter feed - and the timing was eerily perfect. We were in the midst of re-examining what it was we were doing for our client and why. The roadmap we had originally created had shifted and morphed and when all was said and done, there we were with a "map" but the idea of where we were going, our focus, got hazy. To most, it just looked like a bunch of feature changes.

Building a roadmap is challenging. You know the least amount you will know at the beginning, and that is when your team (and your client) want to know what it is you plan to do and how much will it take. Historically, we've tried different approaches to make this more efficient and realistic for us and our clients. But at the end of the day, roadmaps tend to just look like a big list of features, a bunch of "stuff" that we are going to do. In the background, it's all intentional and tied to the needs we've so far determined, but it doesn't make the picture clearer. The idea of identifying the themes to focus our discussion and solutions is one I'm willing to try. It may not be the only answer for roadmaps and project scope, but if anything - it's the place to start.

Yehuda Katz has announced the new major release of Ember.JS. Unlike typical major releases, they are using this major release as an opportunity to remove features (see Release Notes) that have been deprecated as of Ember 1.13. We appreciate the Ember team's mindful philosophy toward releases (and providing long-term support in a sensible manner). It definitely helps teams like us out.

We're always on the lookout for new technologies at Planet Argon. One that looks interesting right now is Elixir. This tutorial covers getting started with Elixir using the Phoenix framework. It is still pretty early days, and some things seem to have changed since the tutorial was written, but that's the nature of the cutting edge.

Like all software companies, estimates are a challenging aspect of the business for us at Planet Argon. Why are they so troublesome? What can be done about it? The Clever PM has an interesting and informative article about this topic.

A very creative plug-in that turns your 'Back to Top' buttons into a delightful, unexpected experience.

Created by Tim Holman.

We ran into an issue requiring us to send an action from our Ember controller to a component rendered within its template. A surprisingly difficult task due to the compartmentalization of Ember's Components, and the frameworks emphasis on "data down, actions up".

Fortunately we ran into this post by Sam Selikoff and the ember add-on it has inspired, ember-component-inbound-actions.

We didn't end up using the add-on due to the overall simplicity of the solution at hand, but it was so good we just had to share!

Thanks Sam!

AKA: Planet Argon's Year in Review 2014.

This year, we asked everyone to compile some of their favorite things from this year. We decided to release the results with a website (surprise!) and showcase a little about each of the team's favorite things.

Our fellow front-end dev & designer, Jack Bouba, put together some beautiful illustrations to showcase each category.

Photo: Marco Walker

As a vinyl collector (can you smell my elitism?), I really enjoyed learning more about the process. If only Mr. Rogers were able to narrate it for me.