There is never a ‘good time’ to do research, but we can at least all agree when and why it is necessary for strategic product decisions. What happens when the only research you can fit in your project is remote – with participants and with a co-located team? Before you cringe, pull your hair, or just laugh – here are some techniques we learned during our recent engagement with DailyPay.

At Carbon Five we try to be agile about our technology choices and pick the simplest tool for the job at hand. That means that even in 2019, the era of React and Redux and GraphQL and all the other fancy tools for client-side web applications, sometimes the best tool for our clients is a good old Rails app, serving HTML.

Often the vision for the project pushes us towards a Single Page Application instead — maybe the app is going to be highly interactive or include realtime data, or the client is already invested in a front-end framework. In those cases, of course, we’ll reach for React or Angular or Vue. But for the traditional CRUD app that just needs to show some data and let users update it, a small team of experienced Rails developers can get an idea to market incredibly quickly.

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When writing React components, we sometimes need access to lifecycle events to handle a variety of side effects: fetching data on mount, sanitizing props when the component updates, cleaning up before the component unmounts, etc.

Each team has their own tolerance for what is and is not a reason to request changes on a PR and block it from being merged. This may be rooted in process, fairness, and expediency, and may be a company or team decision. Whatever your personal philosophy may be, the team as a whole and often the company has to come to some sort of consensus as to what constitutes a reason to block a PR. Over time, I’ve gotten a little more “block happy” and I’m going to talk about some of the advantages and pitfalls of blocking, and give you a mega list of reasons you might want to block a PR.

What’s the most important meeting of your day? For everyone involved in building your product — product managers, developers, designers — it should be the daily stand-up. Where else can you learn what your coworkers are doing, get your work unblocked, and get energized, all in 10 action-packed minutes? 

It’s a simple idea that can help your digital product take shape; when a user enters your system, do you hand them a map or a path? What’s the difference? Great question, and in this case, the metaphor is pretty literal.

In smaller projects, React offers snappy performance – the virtual DOM diffing means updates can happen quickly and for the most part, things just work. But, particularly when you’re dealing with large data sets, things can bog down as every render loop causes many unnecessary renders of components which have not actually changed.

React Dev Tools comes with a profiler that can help pin down the problem, and React 16.8 came with some features to make it easier to improve performance of functional components. But to use these tools effectively you need to know what the problem is and how to find the culprit.

“Data is ubiquitous technology. We’re constantly collecting it, manipulating it, and trying to monetize it.” – Jess Starr, Product Manager, Okta

Carbon Five San Francisco hosted Product Talk Night to discuss the different ways data and business intelligence can impact product development and business growth. Our guest speakers included: 

• Jess Starr, Product Manager, Okta | @okta
• Mira Cho, Product Manager, LaunchDarkly | @miracho

If you’ve spent any amount of time in the open source community, you’re probably familiar with GitHub issues. Issues are a fantastic way to organize the discussion around bugs and feature development in a codebase, and it’s common for open source projects to rely on issues to communicate actionable chunks of work to contributors. This practice is ubiquitous in open source repositories on GitHub, and with the help of issue labels and milestones, issues have supported the development of tons of projects and technologies. 

Earlier this year, React added the powerful new Hooks feature. Hooks allow you to ditch class components and stick with functional components, even when you need local state and lifecycle methods. They also make it much easier to extract logic from one component and share it with others.