By Allie O'Connell on
in
User Research
Creating a consistent feedback loop with users through quantitative and qualitative user research is the foundation of any lean, user-centric product team.
By Brian Griggs on
in
Development, JavaScript
If your project could at all be described as a web application, your UX pipeline would likely benefit from adopting Cypress. Beating out Selenium on speed as well as breadth of testing tools, Cypress provides automated testing of your website’s critical features in a matter of minutes.
A testing framework built on top of many familiar techs — Mocha, JQuery, Chai — Cypress can be a frustrating product because, though it looks familiar, it behaves in unfamiliar ways. But its powerful tooling means mastering this framework is well worth the effort.
Here are the most important things to know as you dive into Cypress.
By Prakash Venkatraman on
in
Development, Elixir, Ops
In my last post, I described how to generate a platform-specific Elixir release. Now, the only thing left to do is to put it on the world wide web.
To follow along with this post, you’ll need a few things:
By Shannon Wells on
in
Development, golang
Several months ago, I had a story requiring metaprogramming in golang. I wasn’t very familiar with reflections in Go, and the available docs and write-ups aren’t the best for me, since I’m a learn-by-example kind of person. Having come to Go (ha) as a Rubyist, the lack of generics left a little bit of a hole in my heart, but a stiff upper lip, I pressed on and learned about reflections. Since I had to write my own examples anyway, it made sense to clean this up and turn it into a blog.
By Brandy Davis-Balsamo on
in
Process
Given the COVID-19 crisis, most companies that can have shifted to temporary work from home policy. While about a quarter of those companies are likely already adept at working remotely — at least to some degree. The rest are completely new to this way of working and it’s not an easy shift. I’d like to share a few tips from our experience working with remote-first companies and across distributed teams.
By Linden Melvin on
in
Development
GraphQL is growing in popularity because it allows applications to request only the data they need using a strongly-typed, self-documenting query structure that enables an API to deliver data that can evolve over time.
Unlike traditional REST APIs, GraphQL exposes a single endpoint to query and mutate data. Upon learning this, one of the first questions that comes up for many developers is: “How do I implement authorization and authentication in GraphQL?”
By Shannon Croy on
in
Process
Carbon Five has worked with a variety of clients across the globe and within our own five offices that require remote collaboration while maintaining a sense of camaraderie and team cohesion.
With a lot of teams transitioning to remote workforces, we opened up the conversation to share some of our best practices. We would love to hear what you are doing as well. Tweet us at @carbonfive to share any other tips and tools your team finds effective!
By Sarah Port on
in
Development
Customizing your terminal is a fun way to streamline and personalize your digital workspace. People are more productive when using tools they enjoy and tend to value things they made themselves at a premium, but, as with all technical adventures, it can also be a little tedious to track down all the relevant documentation. This tutorial assumes you’re using zsh as your terminal shell. If you’re not sure what shell you’re using, the following will print the default shell path:
$ echo $SHELL
By Wil Wade on
in
Process
Projects tend to have three types of “tasks” for developers to do: features, bugs, and chores. Features and bugs are mostly self-explanatory. Features deliver direct customer value. Bugs are features that are not working as intended. These two tasks focus on direct connections to the users. Chores provide indirect customer value. Indirect value can be hard to identify as it can come through a variety of paths.
By Shannon Croy on
in
Design, Events
Carbon Five San Francisco hosts Talk Nights and invites the community to join the conversation on how we can build better products together.
This month we were joined by two guest speakers from IDEO, Kaitlyn Irvine, an Interaction Designer, and Nadia Surtees, a Design Researcher. Together, they discussed Human-Centered Learning Loops and some of their recent user research projects done by IDEO in collaboration with Carbon Five.