Articles on Development

Rudy Jahchan

  Thanks to PokemonGO, the streets are filled with people racing around cities, stopping to interact with virtual characters they could see through their phone camera. The experience is familiar to us at Carbon Five; 6 months ago we were doing the same thing on the streets of San Francisco playing our own augmented reality …

Alex Cruikshank

There is plenty of research to show that taking stairs is one of the best ways to work out without taking time out to exercise. Taking the elevator wastes electricity, and the stairs are a great opportunity to improve overall health. With this in mind, we wanted to encourage people to start thinking about using …

Thomas Fisher

On a recent Elixir project, I needed to test some asynchronous behaviour. Doing so led me to learn about the basics of special processes in OTP. Our project was using Phoenix Channels and had a need to keep track of all connected socket processes. We could have used the upcoming Phoenix presence feature, but we …

Andrew Hao

In Part 1 of this series, we introduced a high-performing engineering team at SuperStartupCorp that had automated repetitive tasks, codified its engineering practices, and adopted a learning mindset, resulting in happy engineers and happy stakeholders. Read on to learn more traits and practices that make this team so successful, and how they keep their bus …

Francesca Darlington

  Check out the latest Heroku case study, featuring Carbon Five. The article explains how we build 35+ Apps a year and use Heroku for 90% of our software projects for wide range of clients. Courtney, Erik, and David share their thoughts on the platform’s support for rapid deployment, language flexibility, and ease of use. Find out …

Francesca Darlington

  Twice a year, all of the Carbon Five offices congregate for our company-wide Summit. One of the funnest parts of these all company trips is the Codeo, which we have been running for the last few years and they have become an integral part of our DNA. For those that don’t know, our Codeo …

Christian Nelson

Buzz has been building up around Elixir (and Phoenix) in the development community over the last year. We’re pretty excited about them too and want to share the reasons why they’ve piqued our interest and what we’ve learned so far. We decided to kick the tires by rewriting one of our in-house web applications using …

Zoe Madden-Wood

Among many of the new features of ES6, aka ECMAScript 2015, is the arrow function expression, also known as the fat arrow function. For those that have been programming in CoffeeScript, the syntax will look quite at home. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. …

Thomas Fisher

If you’ve practiced Test-Driven Development, you know that fast-to-execute tests are more than just a nice-to-have. As suites get slow, developers run them less often locally. Failures start to crop up in the CI environment, and the length of time between a breaking change and its detection increases. The problem gets worse with acceptance tests. …

Zoe Madden-Wood

After attending Allen Wirts-Brock’s presentation on ES6 and ES7 at ForwardJS last week, I asked him if there was more momentum in shaping the JavaScript language recently. ES6, or ECMAScript 2015, has only just been released and shall soon be followed by ES7, or ECMAScript 2016. And what is ECMAScript, you may ask? ECMAScript is nothing …