Articles on Development

Will Ockelmann-Wagner

Hooks significantly simplify your code, and you can use them within an existing React codebase that otherwise uses classes. And it’s easy to dive right into using hooks – until you try to test your fancy new components.

Zoe Madden-Wood

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 …

Brian Griggs

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. …

Shannon Wells

You, fellow software engineer, have probably felt the same as I have: while coding some big feature, you find a thing that is inefficient, unreadable, deprecated, confusing, or just buggy. Maybe it’s not bad code at all — you just realize that several packages are out of date, or your framework needs to be upgraded. …

Eric Fung

Recently we’ve noticed a number of our clients maintain a backlog of small tasks that are handled separately from their main backlog. These are tasks that should be finished at some point, but will rarely take priority over business-critical features and bugfixes. Often they are bite-sized pieces of work that can be finished in a …

Aaron Harpole

I recently gave a talk at Empex LA in which I talked about my desire to see simplifications and enhancements to using some of the OTP behaviors offered in Elixir. In this post I’m going to explore a simple improvement to the GenServer API that would make it a little easier to work with. GenServers …

Zoe Madden-Wood

Back at my first job in tech, we paired 95% of the time. Many people were new to pairing. As it was my first job, I was relatively one of the more junior people on the team, which is an especially difficult position to be in for pairing. It was an incredibly intense experience for …

Aaron Harpole

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 …

Will Ockelmann-Wagner

Moving your code towards a more functional style can have a lot of benefits – it can be easier to reason about, easier to test, more declarative, and more. One thing that sometimes comes out worse in the move to FP, though, is organization. By comparison, Object Oriented Programming classes are a pretty useful unit …

Zoe Madden-Wood

Active Storage was introduced into Rails version 5.2. It is a highly anticipated addition to handle integrations with asset management such as AWS S3. For a long time, the field has been dominated by outside gems, including Paperclip, which has been around longer than many people have been Rails developers. Now that Active Storage has …