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. 

Continue reading …

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.

Continue reading …

So you want to grow your product? That’s super awesome. Growth is often a goal that startups rush towards. 

“We need 100,000 monthly active users yesterday.” – random startup person 

Growth can mean a lot of things. Maybe you’re trying to grow the number of users, or increase time spent using your product. Whatever it is, growth usually means moving metrics. But meeting your growth goal takes a very meticulous and strategic design process. You need to try out ideas and see what actually works. In this article, I am going to share how to set up a successful experiment-driven design process that can help you identify the features and changes to grow your product. Let’s grow!

Continue reading …

We’re excited to announce our 2019 partnership with Techstars NYC today. Since 2017, Carbon Five has run workshops and directly mentored dozens of startups and first time entrepreneurs at the Techstars programs in Atlanta, Seattle and NYC.

Continue reading …

The primary function of design is to make something useful. Unfortunately, many digital products out on the market have been developed without universal accessibility in mind. As designers, we have the unique opportunity — and responsibility — to help shape the next generation of inclusive and accessible technology. 

Continue reading …

It is a delight to use software that seems to really ‘get’ you as a person! To achieve this, it requires that the software has been built by people who sought out to understand their users. When software isn’t built with its users in mind, it has the potential to leave its users feeling alienated. In this post, we’ll be exploring a seemingly simple item we often put on forms that is very easy to get wrong: the gender field.

Continue reading …

Wil Wade, senior developer at Carbon Five, will be speaking at QCon New York on June 25. His talk on thinking in systems focuses on understanding the context of this complexity through the patterns and structures around us; a perfect complement to Agile’s small iterable steps.

This interview was originally published on QCon New York.

Continue reading …

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.

Continue reading …

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.

Continue reading …

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.

Continue reading …