Intercom has completed a major project to rewrite core parts of its product using the Ember.js framework. Tom Dale, one of the founders of Ember, visited Intercom's offices for two weeks to consult with their engineering teams. During his visit, Tom was interviewed about various topics such as the need for frameworks, web standards, bikeshedding, and open source. He describes Ember as an "opinionated" framework, meaning that it provides a default way of doing things for certain tasks. This approach is necessary to overcome human psychology's ego-depletion concept, where people's decision-making abilities are finite. Tom cites the example of organ donation rates in countries where drivers can opt-in or out when renewing their licenses, highlighting how default settings can affect outcomes. He emphasizes the importance of "sane defaults" in software development and believes that Ember's conventions and URL support make it a better choice for certain applications. Tom also discusses the need for the web to be the platform of choice for developing apps, rather than native platforms, and is involved with efforts to promote this vision through standards bodies and browser vendors. He believes that exposing new capabilities into the platform, rather than building high-level APIs, is key to the web's long-term health. Additionally, Tom discusses Ember's community management strategies, which prioritize making contribution barriers low and frequent releases to keep the project fresh and relevant.