One month ago I was on a panel at Grace Hopper, “Startups, Big Companies, Silicon Valley, Government Contractor — What’s the right career path for you?”. I was speaking mostly to software engineers who were just entering their career post-college or transitioning from their first job. I was on the panel with four other talented software engineers from a range of job experiences, Sha-Mayn Teh (Teachers Pay Teachers), Jennifer Liu (Quizlet), Neena Parikh (Benchling), and Stephanie deWet (Pinterest). Here are some of the thoughts I personally shared with the room on how to decide on what kind of company to work for.

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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 post, we’ll show you how to pass your build environment from the native environment to your javascript environment. In the process, you should get a better idea of how to build simple NativeModules.

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When the opportunity came up to participate in the Carbon Five apprenticeship program in April, I was first in line. With two other apprentices, I spent the next three months at Carbon Five, working alongside a mentor across client and internal projects.

I had been working as a junior developer for about a year and was looking for an opportunity that provided mentorship that would allow me to level-up my skill set. I would often be asked why quit your job and take an apprenticeship position when you are already working. Yet given the experience I had, if all apprenticeships were like that of Carbon Five, I think they would be invaluable to any junior developer. So why? Continue reading …

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 game. A game our tiny, three person team conceived, built and delivered in under a month, in and around our regular client workload!

This was no simple feat. In addition to the tight timeline, most of our day to day work focuses on mobile and web applications. Working in 3D was something only some of us have tried, with little practical experience.

So how did we do it?

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Excitement continues to grow around the functional programming language Elixir and it’s web framework Phoenix. Many are intrigued by the pair’s ability to scale due to the Erlang VM while remaining maintainable and understandable thanks to their Ruby and Rails pedigree.

But is it production ready? Should you consider it for your next project? Basically, is it time to drink the Elixir? It’s a question we’ve answered before and we want to continue that conversation.

That’s why we’re inviting you to our next Talk Night, centering on the practical use and adoption of this exciting new language.

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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 (short for “Code Rodeo”) is a 2-day internal hackathon. The goal of the Codeo is to have fun creating a product with people you haven’t had a chance to work with in a while (or maybe ever).

The teams are made up of mixture of office locations and cross-functional groups so that everyone has a different role to play (developers, designers, product manager, and operations). The focus of this Codeo was “Slackbots” with the overall goal to create something that helps out our co-workers and/or Carbon Five as a whole. The only rule was to use an existing internal Slack channel as inspiration for the project.

Here is a snapshot of each team’s Slackbot, as told by the team. Continue reading …

We’re catching up with some of the most inspiring founders we’ve worked with to share insights and advice from their experience of starting and growing businesses. Recently, we worked with the Joyable team on their iOS app, and we were inspired by their customer-focused mindset. For those who are not yet familiar, Joyable offers an online Cognitive Behavioral Therapy program to help individuals overcome social anxiety. Every decision made by Pete and Steve from the outset was validated by real consumer experience.

We also published an extended version of this interview on Medium.

1) What was the “aha moment” that motivated you to start Joyable?

Pete: I knew I wanted to do something in healthcare, and I wanted to see problems on the ground [and] do some customer development work. So I convinced some doctors at Stanford Hospital, where I was in business school, to let me shadow them. I followed doctors in the emergency room for eight hours a day. It was fascinating and really fun. As anyone who works in a hospital will tell you, there are many things that can be improved in hospitals— even at great hospitals.

That hit me really hard. This idea that someone was in bad enough shape that they went to an emergency room, and they were being told to wait three months. – Pete Shalek

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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 more or less than the standard that defines what JavaScript is. With the last major release of ES5.1 back in 2011, and two new releases two years in a row, it appeared to me there was new momentum put into evolving this incredibly popular language. This blog will give you an overview of how JavaScript is being shaped over time and give a high-level look at ES6 and ES7.

Shaping JavaScript

Allen famously created the JavaScript language with Brendan Eich in just 10 days in May of 1995. He points out that while that statement is true, the reality is that there was a lot of thought preceding those 10 days about how the language would be shaped. After initially creating the language, it was picked up by two different companies who were trying to develop it independently. That is when the standards committee was developed. Technical Committee 39 (TC-39) of ECMA International now sets the ECMAScript standard. The standards committee is headed by pioneers in the business: Mozilla, jQuery, Meteor, Salesforce, Internet Explorer, Intel, et al. Continue reading …

This week I returned from a 2-week trip through 4 cities in China. I was born there, spent a fair amount of time there growing up, and I also lived there for a year on a Fulbright fellowship after college. Today, I work as in San Francisco at Carbon Five as a product manager, helping startups and tech companies turn their ideas into software.

Although the purpose of this trip was family-based, and though I’ve been there before, seeing China’s adoption of mobile technology completely blew my mind. The growing differences between U.S. and China mobile applications made my stay pretty difficult in ways I hadn’t experienced or expected. While I missed my American apps, the sophistication of extremely powerful Chinese apps also took me by surprise, with just a handful of many-featured, multi-purpose apps dominating my usage.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.

Blocked Apps

Some of the apps that – straight up –  will not work:

• Facebook (blocked by the government for not censoring content and providing access to user data after the 2009 Xinjiang riots)
• Instagram
• All things Google (including web browsing, gmail, drive and google maps)

What do I mean by not working? It’s not like you’ll see a notification like this:

It’ll look more like this:

Never have I ever upgraded so many Apple native apps out of my Appleware folder as I had to in China. But let’s move on to the good. Continue reading …

As a full-service software consultancy, we at Carbon Five get lots of questions from clients past, present, and future. We’re passionate about sharing our industry knowledge, so we sat down with our leadership team and got some advice for aspiring founders and product leaders as part of an ongoing 6-part series. You can see all the interviews here.

Here in part four, we asked Partner and Director of Design David Hendee to talk to us about costs, operations and the big brand.

Should I work with an outside design agency? Do I need a branding firm?

Carbon Five is an action-oriented consultancy. We are passionate about putting product into market, not just having great ideas. The question does come up: how much design do I need to get started with Carbon Five? The real answer is none. You can come with just an idea. On day one, we’ll talk about the people your product solves a problem for, what you think the problem is, and how you think you’re going to solve it. That’s a great starting point for working with us, because we can do both design and the first version of your brand. Our clients work with our in-house designers, but sometimes we’ll partner with outside agencies, which can be great as well.

More important, I think is do you have a team that can solve a problem and has the grit and wherewithal to take the money and actually do something effective with it?

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