Articles on Development

Erin Swenson-Healey

Preface To quote Rúnar Bjarnason: One of the great features of modern programming languages is structural pattern matching on algebraic data types. Once you’ve used this feature, you don’t ever want to program without it. You will find this in languages like Haskell and Scala. I couldn’t agree more myself. That said, I spend most …

Will Ockelmann-Wagner

These days I’ve been writing a lot more functional javascript, using tools like RxJS and Ramda. They allow for beautiful, declarative pipelines of functions, like:

Andrew Hao

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 …

Anna Neyzberg

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?

Will Ockelmann-Wagner

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 …

Anna Sherman

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 …

Will Ockelmann-Wagner

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 …

Andrew Hao

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. …

Craig Lyons

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 …

David Hendee

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 …