Field Notes from Carbon Five

Ben Dicks

It’s safe to say that a portfolio is one of the most important means to landing your first design job. Yet the work to build a portfolio is arduous for designers at any level. Gathering artifacts and documentation from past projects is time-consuming and often reveals disparities in depth, breadth, and overall quality from project …

Carbon Five

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 1 — Today, West Monroe announced it has acquired Carbon Five, a national product management, digital design, and software engineering firm. The acquisition is part of West Monroe’s strategy to expand its end-to-end digital services in response to unprecedented market demand and comes on the heels of acquiring Verys, a 200-person product development …

Albert Yi

It’s no secret that Ruby trivializes many classic design patterns. What might take 30 lines in Java can often be a one-liner in Ruby. But there’s more to learning a design pattern than reading some pseudo code about Widgets and AbstractFlyweightDecoratorFactory classes. The Command pattern is an abstraction that will be familiar to most experienced …

Alice Wenner

First released to the public in 2004, Ruby on Rails is an open source web-application framework written in the Ruby programming language. We sat down with Carbon Five Director of Engineering Matt Brictson to discuss all things Ruby on Rails, including the benefits of using Rails versus an all-Javascript stack, what’s in store for the …

Carbon Five

Carbon Five Roll Call is a blog series introducing you to our team of product managers, designers, and software engineers at Carbon Five. Meet the team and learn how we can help support your next project. This week, we’d like to introduce you to Isai! Name: Isai Lopez Rodas Title: Software Engineer Hometown: Petaluma, CA …

Paul Raythattha

You’ve read all the agile docs about how important it is to have a regular reflection meeting. You’ve sat through so many retros that you’ve lost count—and maybe you’ve even run more than a few yourself. But, for some reason, your retrospectives just aren’t as magical as the ones you read about. You’re not alone! …

Nicole Thayer

Welcome to our final post (for now) in the series on intersectionality in the tech industry. Before now, we were focused on how we at Carbon Five might improve at building products with an intersectional lens. For those unfamiliar with the term, intersectionality is defined by Merriam Webster as “the complex, cumulative way in which …

Carbon Five

Carbon Five Roll Call is a blog series introducing you to our team of product managers, designers, and software engineers at Carbon Five. Meet the team and learn how we can help support your next project. Now introducing, Ifeanyi! Name: Ifeanyi Iyke-Azubogu Title: Software Engineer Intern Hometown: Baltimore, MD College/Universtiy: University of Maryland College Park Emoji of choice: ⏳ …

Alice Wenner

Anna Neyzberg’s first job in the tech industry was not great: women employees weren’t encouraged to speak up, and when they did, management didn’t pay attention. Now a software engineer at Carbon Five, Anna co-founded ElixirBridge in 2016 to teach people from underrepresented groups how to code. In our final post in a series celebrating …

Alice Wenner

Carbon Five Product Manager Emily Mi Cai has spent the past three years working with Minds Matter to help a high school student in her community navigate the college admissions process. In our fourth post in a series celebrating 21 years of mentorship in honor of Carbon Five’s 21st anniversary, Emily discusses why she’s passionate …