Elm emerged on the scene in early 2012 as a strongly-typed, functional language that compiles down to Javascript. With its architecture and type system, it claims to provide bulletproof guardrails to help developers build systems that are highly reliable, with “no runtime exceptions in practice”.

Elm prides itself on having a low barrier of entry – it can be introduced as a component into an existing web app, so long as your app can provide it a self-contained div. In fact, the creators of Elm strongly advocate taking an incremental approach to introducing Elm into your systems.

Lately, a few Carbon Fivers and I have been taking the language out for a spin and discovering what it means to write software systems in Elm. In this post, we’ll walk through what it looks like to take a small form widget written in vanilla jQuery and convert it to Elm, picking up language basics and learning to write apps the Elm way. We’ll also discuss the unique feature set that makes Elm apps so reliable.

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Elixir has been getting a lot of attention these days for being such a powerful language. It is highly-concurrent, fault-tolerant, and scalable.

When beginning to learn Elixir, you quickly come upon the term Pattern Matching.
What is Pattern Matching and more importantly what do you need to know? Continue reading …

Let’s say that you’re working on an Angular 4 app that displays some images. You want to add a directive you can apply to any image tag to make it look fancy when you mouse over it. You also want a component that will take up 100% of its parent container’s width and display an array of images in a flex row. Let’s call these FancyImageDirective and ImageRowComponent. Continue reading …

Using git for version control allows for powerful collaboration in tech teams. Like any tool, if misused, it can also cause some serious headaches. After working with a wide variety of team sizes and dynamics, I’ve found that the squash and rebase workflow helps make the collaboration process more efficient and a hell of a lot less painful.

What is the squash rebase workflow?

It’s simple – before you merge a feature branch back into your main branch (often master or develop), your feature branch should be squashed down to a single buildable commit, and then rebased from the up-to-date main branch. Here’s a breakdown.

At Carbon Five it’s pretty common to do our editing in vim embedded in a tmux session. Tmux, if you haven’t used it, is a “terminal multiplexer” that lets you create multiple tabs and panes in a terminal, persist terminal sessions, and (with plugins) send commands from vim to another pane. It’s also great for remote pair programming, since you can share a session over the internet.

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Raphael Koh

In our last Domain-Driven Design discussion, we learned how to group similar business components into application Bounded Contexts, which were separated folders in our Rails apps. This segregated cohesive groups of application code into separate folder structures (bounded contexts), and gave us a jumping-off point to drawing more explicit boundaries between domains in our monolith. Now it’s time for us to re-think how to communicate from one context to another. Here’s how:

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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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Recently, designers and technologists from Cooper & Carbon Five sat down to brainstorm about the future of voice-driven user experiences, focusing initially on Alexa. It was a fun kickoff for what we hope turns into a series of prototypes and experiments exploring (and pushing) the boundaries of this exciting emerging technology. Here’s what we’ve discovered so far:

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As a consulting firm that’s been around for 17 years, Carbon Five has a unique perspective on trends in digital product development. In this post we look back on 2016 and reflect on what we’ve seen in the industry, and where we think it’s headed. Here are the the top five trends we saw in 2016.

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Working on an oldish Rails project, I came across some smelly ActiveRecord code that begged for some refactoring love. I also spent some time speeding up pages with slow/many database calls. Between those two experiences, I felt the inspiration to write-up some “Back to Basics” Rails Database Best Practices.

Rule #1: Let your Database do its Job

Databases are extremely feature rich and are really freakin fast when used properly. They’re great at filtering and sorting… and many other things. If the database can do it, it will do it way faster than doing the same thing in Ruby, or any other language for that matter.

You might have to learn a little bit about how DBs work, but honestly, you don’t have to go very deep to reap a majority of the benefits.

We generally use Postgres. What you choose is less important than getting to know it and using its features to make your product awesome. If you’re curious about Postgres, there are some good resources at the end of this post. We love it.

Our first, overarching rule: Let your database do what databases are good at, instead of doing it in Ruby.

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