Articles on Development

David Hendee

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 …

Christian Nelson

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 …

Andrew Hao

Check out the video of this talk from ElixirConf 2017 below Monolithic applications are great when you start building your company, but as time progresses, they become difficult to maintain. These codebases, as they grow, easily become Big Balls of Mud. When building large applications in frameworks like Rails, the very convention-over-configuration design principles that made …

Andrew Hao

I want to discuss a topic near to my heart, a topic I believe to be the crux of effective software design. No, it’s not a new functional language, it’s not a fancy new framework, it’s not a how-to guide to do micro-services, nor a quantum leap in the field of machine learning. It’s much simpler. It’s …

Ken Shimizu

React Native is an emerging platform in the mobile space that allows developers to write native apps in Javascript without having to learn Java or Swift. It’s great conceptually, but developers end up having to write NativeModules (for iOS and Android) anyway because it lacks the tools that other frameworks generally provide. In this blog …

Andy Stanberry

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 …

Audrey An

  The tech scene (especially in the Bay Area) has reached a point where it’s expanded way past techies. It seems successful people from all different industries are drawn to the promise, reach, and money in tech. Doctors, bankers, artists, and even educators are launching startups and talking about MVPs. It’s definitely exciting and inspires …

Andrew Hao

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we introduced the engineering team at SuperStartupCorp. They had built a reputation for delivering quality software, fostering a culture of trust, and developing healthy learning practices. Read up on the first two parts, then join us to discover the final secrets to their success.

Thomas Fisher

At Carbon Five, we’ve been getting excited about Elixir and Phoenix – with its promise of the productivity of Ruby and Rails without the performance penalty. We’ve used it for a few of our internal projects with great success, but we’re always wary of any new technology’s hype cycle. We wanted a bit more experience …

Rudy Jahchan

The micro-services push is on with developers writing simpler applications that interact with each other. But how do you deploy these services? Manage versions and discoverability? Learn two approaches from our August 17th Talk Night speakers as they cover using Docker or going completely server-less with Amazon Web Services’ Lambda! First we’ll have Samuel Chow, …