Articles on Everything Else

J.J. Arnold

This month we welcome J.J. Arnold to the Carbon Five blog. J.J. recently joined us as the office and events coordinator in the San Francisco office. Her first week coincided with one of our semi-annual retreats, and she graciously agreed to write up a diary of her experience. April 21st marked the start of Carbon …

Michael Wynholds

Note: If you’re looking for information on Houdini or Toggle, you’re in the right spot. After changing the project name from Toggle to Houdini (for SEO reasons), we’ve switched again (there was another Houdini already). If you know of another language called “Presto” please let us know, we’ve got more names. At Carbon Five we …

Alexa Roman

You’ve got a software project — you just need the resources to do it. So you start writing an RFP (Request for proposal). You put down the budget, timeline and deliverables in an effort to properly scope the initiative. After all, you need to find the best qualified team which means you need to be as specific …

Christian Nelson

Steve McConnell wrote a book called “After the Gold Rush” that was published back in 1999. He wrote about how the software development industry would benefit by maturing and becoming a professional industry that had learned from the mistakes made during the tech bubble of the late 90s (Steve is actually better known as the …

Michael Wynholds

Hopefully by now everyone has heard about the Bash remote execution vulnerability, and is sufficiently terrified. We here at Carbon Five all use Macs, and so we are all by default vulnerable. Here are the steps we took to secure our computers. Maybe they can help you too.

Ken Shimizu

Here at Carbon Five, we have been making an increased effort to reach out to the growing junior developer community to provide guidance and mentorship. We piloted an event series dubbed Junior Jump, catered towards helping entry level developers prepare for their engineering careers. A few weeks ago, as a part of this event series, …

Alexa Roman

We’ve heard lots of feedback from those of you using Stickies.io. Today, we launched a few small updates. Here’s what’s new: 1) New landing screen – with an easier way to give us feedback 2) More color, less shadows – for a brighter day 3) New background – behold the dots! 4) Most importantly – we dropped the name …

David Hendee

In the years since we’ve been providing integrated design and development on agile teams, we’ve noticed something that seems to emerge naturally on projects that are going particularly well. While we always set out to design our products in small releases, refactoring along the way (i.e. “the smallest whole“), often designers find themselves quickly under …

Erin Swenson-Healey

Your Rails application has become a monolith. Your test suite takes 30 minutes to run, your models grow to several hundred (or thousand!) lines, and feature development slows to a crawl. New members of your team must read through massive amounts of code before they can feel confident making changes. You’ve watched Uncle Bob’s Architecture …

Erin Swenson-Healey

Connecting the components of a distributed systems is no easy feat. Should I use REST? An RPC system like Apache Thrift? Protocol Buffers? SOAP? How do I document these components’ APIs? What’s the best way to write client bindings? The Internet offers a wide array of possible solutions, all of which I’ve found to be …