Great communication is at the heart of a great team with the free and clear exchange of ideas flowing between design, development, and product. However, we’ve all had moments where the team gets “blocked” on a design; some members struggling putting their thoughts into words, others feel they have to provide high quality comps, while others remain silent feeling they don’t have the skill or place to contribute.

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October 21st, 2015. A day historic before it ever happened. For those of you who don’t know why STOP READING THIS POST AND GO WATCH BACK TO THE FUTURE II.

Go on, we’ll wait.

Back? You’re welcome.

As you now know, October 21st, 2015 is when everyhero Marty McFly is due to arrive. To celebrate, we’re holding a Back to the Future themed Talk Night at Carbon Five Santa Monica!

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Several members of the Carbon Five team were in St. Louis this past weekend (9/24-26) for Strange Loop. The conference focuses on the intersection of computer science and industry. As usual the conference is committed to delivering tech-focused, fantastic content which has all been made available online.

Before you start wading through all those videos, however, we thought we could offer up a few of our favorites to share.

Propositions as Types by Philip Wadler

Dr. Wadler gives a lively overview of the history of computation and formal logic. Using this history he showcases how a deep understanding of the nature of the universe can be used to discover new programming language designs.
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For the past few Sundays a group of me and other C5’ers came into the office to work on BridgeTroll with a few junior developers. We hoped that BridgeTroll would get a few highly requested features, but mostly we really hoped the junior developers would get practice and pick up some good practices about TDD, agile, and coding in general.

This was actually our second iteration of teaching pairing (and teaching through pairing). The first time was on a weeknight and between setup and getting everyone on the same page, not much learning was had. This incarnation of the program addressed the setup issue and having continuity over the course of several weeks seemed to work well. To be fair, there was a lot of story preparation time we sunk in before the start of the program so that most of the time could be spent on developing so that helped. It also really helped that BridgeTroll has an excellent setup script, which made starting a ton smoother.

Why would anyone put on a free program to teach industry skills? There must be something they expect in return.

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Silicon Beach Fest is coming up next week! If you’re in Los Angeles or can travel there, get your tickets before they’re gone. (Note: open the design guide for a special discount) Carbon Five is involved in the Design Track and we’d love to see you there. The Design Track takes place next Friday, June 26th at the Marina del Rey Hotel.

Get Tickets

For those of you who haven’t been, Silicon Beach Fest (SBF) is a conference based in LA focused on entrepreneurship and technology. The last few years it has drawn more than 2,000 attendees and media attention, most notably from the New York Times and TechCrunch. SBF has helped countless founders, designers and technologists find support in the form of advice, teams and services.

Join us for the Design Track on Friday for: Continue reading …

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Virtual Reality is something we at Carbon Five have been playing around with the past few months, learning not only how to get started but how we can use our current toolset to work within the growing field. That’s why I was excited two weeks ago to give a talk on getting started in virtual reality through JavaScript and WebVR at EmpireJS in New York. We all had a fun time while I (wearing a TRON hoodie and Snow Crash referencing tee) walked through what we’ve learned while cracking jokes about Lawnmower Man and the 90s obsession with VR.

The video of the talk is available above (thanks to the EmpireJS crew for it and being incredible hosts) and the slide deck is available below. Try out demos on our VR demo site c5vr.com with all the code being available through the site’s repository.

Finally, we’re holding a workshop in our Santa Monica office walking through the same concepts for the Android platform, using Google Cardboard and Unity on Wednesday May 20th at 7:00pm PDT. For $15 you get one of the limited spots and your own take-home headset so if you’re interested, please register here!

Star Wars Day isn’t the only thing to look forward to this May. Join us for some new (and classic) events this month. If you’re looking for some adventure our hack nights are a great place to find it. Find kindred souls, work on your own projects, or build a lightsaber. Every hack night is different but they are always free and everyone is invited to laugh, learn, and drink beer at a Carbon Five office near you. Interested in something more cerebral? Have lunch at AutoDesk for a Sum of the Parts talk or join us in our new LA office for an AIGA Workshop.

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Spring into action by joining us for this months events! Our hack nights are a place for you to work on a project, or get in on a surprise challenge with like-minded folks. Hear brilliant speakers share their thoughts about interesting things at this months Tinderbox discussion.

All events are hosted at a Carbon Five office and are open to the public unless otherwise stated.

Los Angeles – Map
Wed, April 15 @ 6pm // Hack Night
Wed, April 29 @ 6pm // Hack Night Continue reading …

We have a medley of different events this month! Whether you are interested in finding like-minded people or need a space to work on some projects, we have an event worth attending. All events are at a Carbon Five office unless otherwise specified.

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