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.

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. 

It remains a common practice in database systems today to refer to configurations where one database is a source of truth, and another database is a replica that follows the state of the source of truth database as a “master/slave” configuration.

Use of this term is problematic. It references slavery to convey meaning about the relationship between two entities. The term “slave” is used because one system is controlling the state of the other system.

Using these terms like this is cavalier. It downplays slavery and the massive human suffering it causes. By having an everyday use for the term “slave” we normalize the concept of having things called “slaves” and it desensitizes us to the seriousness of slavery. More importantly, the casual use of the term may be an unwelcome daily presence in the life of a person of color, for whom slavery has great personal significance. Continue reading …

As the popularity of Elixir and Phoenix continues to grow, we find ourselves spinning up more and more Phoenix apps for our clients and side projects. At Carbon Five, we have a pretty good consensus on our favorite practices and tools. With each new app, we find ourselves repeating the same steps to bring in many of the same resources and processes.

We created Razor, an opinionated app generator, to save ourselves this time and trouble. Razor isn’t the only one out there, but it captures our common needs and preferences at Carbon Five pretty comprehensively. It also provides a great platform for discussion; we hope to watch Razor evolve as the Elixir ecosystem grows and we continue to learn.

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If you’ve spent anytime writing software, you’ve used an open source project. Open source projects save you time and energy by leveraging other people’s experience and hard work, leaving you free to focus on the core features of your project. Often people want to contribute to these projects, but don’t know where to start. They are afraid their contributions will be ignored or, worse yet, attacked. With tools like GitHub freely available for open source projects, anyone can become a contributor. If you follow a few simple steps, you can have a positive experience. Continue reading …