Super Simple Hacks While You’re Figuring Out Your Workflow
There are a lot of really great reasons to use TypeScript, but we’ve occasionally encountered some hesitancy from programmers not sure how much of an adjustment it will be. Learning Typescript is not as complicated as say learning Elm and I’d argue it’s more enjoyable to use than Flow. But the hesitancy is understandable. Many front-end developers have learned JavaScript and Ruby or Python, but have not had to dig into typed languages. Learning to program with types and think about your type system in advance can elevate your programming style and eventually be easier than not using types. However, there are many different ways to be good at programming, and I have seen a range of programming styles that might make the learning curve of TypeScript steeper. Everyone eventually adjusts to TypeScript on their own and most come to love it. From those of us who have already made the change, here are some super simple tips and hacks while you’re getting your sea legs in TypeScript.
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Part of our approach to software development at Carbon Five is to ensure everyone is playing with the same dictionary. The start-of-project questions we all ask are common: What are the success metrics for our stakeholders? Will our customers dislike our product? But words like “success” and “dislike,” “good” and “bad” are all personal words. What they mean will change project-to-project, and even person-to-person.
It’s a common assumption that users and stakeholders know their needs, and can easily voice them. But if a stakeholder has gone through the daunting process of signing with a new team, they may well be looking to that team to define those needs for them. How do we do that?
While it’s not a match for every project, consider adding a demo to the end of your iterations — a scary proposition, but that’s the point. When done right, the benefits of regular demos are massive.
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Carbon Five San Francisco hosted Product Talk Night to discuss the importance of being data-driven in software development and product management.
Allie O’Connell, Senior Product Manager from Carbon Five Chattanooga, discussed her personal experiences with product analytics and shared insights on how to effectively align product success metrics with overall business goals.
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You, fellow software engineer, have probably felt the same as I have: while coding some big feature, you find a thing that is inefficient, unreadable, deprecated, confusing, or just buggy. Maybe it’s not bad code at all — you just realize that several packages are out of date, or your framework needs to be upgraded. You roll your eyes, you sigh, and you think, “Ugh, this has got to be fixed.” It’s technical debt.
You may also have experienced this: you go to your manager, or your project manager, and complain about the Technical Debt. “We really need to upgrade to Rails 5!” Yet you can’t seem to get the go-ahead to fix it. “We have a hard deadline!” “We don’t have time for that!” they say.
Those in charge insist you have more important things to do. How do we convince them otherwise?
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On Wednesday night, designers and design lovers from all over NYC gathered at Carbon Five SoHo to receive career guidance, feedback, and insights from five senior designers. The evening kicked off with a Q&A with our panelists:
- Lo Wheelwright, Senior Product Designer, Carbon Five
- Erin Murphy, User Experience Designer II, HBO
- Nina Mehta, Design Manager, Mailchimp
- Mumta Mittal, Product Designer, Knotel
- Christopher Seeds, Senior Product Designer, Blackboard Insurance
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Does your product development team do a weekly retrospective? At Carbon Five, we think it’s the most important meeting of the week. Here are some tactical suggestions for facilitating a retro, so your team understands their challenges, celebrates their successes, and comes away with an actionable to-do list.
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Carbon Five began as a development shop almost nineteen years ago and added the Product Management discipline fourteen years into our journey. We have realized the importance of involving a Product Manager, who is dedicated to gathering requirements and can easily handle the business and technical aspects required to build successful products. There are many reasons why our clients see greater business success and adopt more efficient software development process when they have a dedicated Carbon Five Product Manager on their team. Here are a few of them:
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Recently we’ve noticed a number of our clients maintain a backlog of small tasks that are handled separately from their main backlog. These are tasks that should be finished at some point, but will rarely take priority over business-critical features and bugfixes. Often they are bite-sized pieces of work that can be finished in a couple of hours or less: addressing engineering chores, paying off tech debt, and addressing minor bugs. Internally, this separate backlog has earned a catchy name: the snacklog.
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Why care about diversity early?
You’re not even sure if you’ll be around in a year. You need to figure out your market, your financing, your OKRs, etc; why should you even care about diversity and equity in hiring? It is not in your MVP and those issues can be solved later, amiright?
When companies put off focusing on diversity and accidentally perpetuate the same mistakes the rest of the industry makes when hiring, they’re creating a problem and then trying to fix it at a later date. Unfortunately, by creating the problem in the first place, it’s now that much harder to fix.
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How can scaling companies maintain design consistency and quality as internal and engineering teams exponentially grow?
Last week, Carbon Five San Francisco hosted Talk Night to answer this question and to discuss the secret benefits of building design systems for growing companies. Our guest speakers included:
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By Zoe Madden-Wood on
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Development
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