Articles on Everything Else
The Junior Jump – A Retrospective
One of our goals here at Carbon Five is to play a bigger part in mentoring the growing community of junior developers. Last week, we took a big step toward that goal by hosting our first ‘Junior Jump’ event in our Santa Monica office. The event, a follow up to this blog post, was centered …
A Lack of API Documentation Considered Harmful
As someone who consumes many web service APIs – both internal and external – the recent trend in the web development community to forgo writing API documentation has got me worried. While I do understand that publishing and maintaining documentation can be a hassle, APIs with no documentation can quickly become a bottleneck in a …
Micromessaging: Connecting Heroku Microservices w/Redis and RabbitMQ
While attempting to deploy a system of interconnected microservices to Heroku recently, I discovered that processes running in dynos in the same application cannot talk to each other via HTTP. I had originally planned on each microservice implementing a “REST” API – but this wasn’t going to be an option if I wanted to stick …
Spring Summit Diary
Last week all of Carbon Five converged on Santa Monica for our bi-annual Summit to talk, eat, and play together. The theme for this season’s summit was Mobile, but as expected some of the most interesting conversations ranged far afield: from the challenges and opportunities of integrating design on Agile teams, to silly employee origin stories, …
The Junior Jump – Life After Coding Bootcamps
As a former Dev Bootcamp (DBC) student, I get a lot of inquiries from recent grads asking for tips on landing a job. I was lucky to get into the DBC early, graduating from the second cohort a year and a half ago, and the job market was quick to pick us up. However, after …
vimtronner: A Multiplayer, Command-line vim Trainer Built on Node.js and Socket.io
Greetings, programs! Meet vimtronner, a multiplayer command-line game that teaches you the core vim keys. Be the last player alive by either controlling your bike safely around obstacles or building your own walls for your opponents to crash into. Just remember: you can’t do both at the same time! You can learn how to install …
Applying Functional Programming Principles To Your Rails Codebase
All the programmers around me seem to have very strong opinions about functional programming. The Internet certainly loves to talk about it. Some of the concepts are interesting – but many of them (at first) don’t seem to apply for those of us writing database-fronting web applications. What can we apply from a world in …
The 6 Essential Traits of the Successful DEO (and what the heck is a DEO?)
Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design, an evening with Authors Maria Giudice & Christopher Ireland On Thursday, November 14, we’re pleased to host the authors of Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design, Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland, in a special event discussing the role of the DEO and their place in navigating the …
Courtney Hemphill Speaks at Lean UX SF Meetup
Come check out Courtney Hemphill as she speaks at this week’s Lean UX SF Meetup this Tuesday as she gears up for her talk at this year’s FlowCon. Courtney will be talking about the weekly flow of product development at Carbon Five, including the importance of fostering integrated teams, establishing cadence, and gathering user feedback …
Kablammo! The Ruby Robot War Has a Winner
At this year’s GoGaRuCo, we ran a coding contest called Kablammo. Contestants submitted robot strategies and their ‘bots fought it out in the arena at Kablammo.io for a chance to win a Printrbot Simple 3D printer. After more than 20 entries and 1,000 battles, we’re ready to announce the winner! Congratulations to Jeff Moore (AKA …