Articles on Process
Raygun: Generating Rails Apps for the Last Year
It was about a year ago that we first announced Raygun, our Rails applications generator. Since then, many apps have been zapped into existence, both internally at Carbon Five and in the wild. Raygun evolved over the year; it does more of some things and less of others. Let’s see what Raygun does and what …
Connecting and speaking
Last night I had the opportunity to do a dry run of my talk for the Flowcon conference coming up this November 1st at the Lean UX SF Meetup. The event was hosted at WeWork which has a beautiful office conveniently right around the corner from ours. Thanks to great promotion by Mike Long and …
Introducing MVAP: The Minimum Viable Awesome Product
Dressing up the old MVP with a little spice Notes on Process: Part 1 of 3 Overview: Last week at lunch I found myself using a plate of beans and rice to explain the basic tenants of MVP. This got me thinking. Could you take a basic burrito and use it as a metaphor for …
Join Lane and Courtney in the Big Apple for LeanUX NYC
Join Lane Halley and Courtney Hemphill in NYC April 11th-13th, 2013 Spend some time this spring in Manhattan learning from 25 designers, innovators, entrepreneurs, and at least a couple developers at the LeanUX NYC conference. TLC Labs and Lean Startup Machine have partnered with NYU Stern’s Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and Cyrus Innovation …
Integrating 3rd-Party APIs: Listen to Your Tests
When integrating 3rd-party APIs, it’s important to listen to your tests. The most common design relies on tests that directly mock the 3rd-party API. These tests are brittle, but are often acceptable because, well, they work. A better approach is to take the time to design an app-specific interface to wrap the 3rd-party API. The …
Keeping Domain Models Cohesive with Collaborators
As an application matures, classes begin to take on more and more responsibilities. Eventually a class’s main responsibility starts to become obscured. You can prevent overwhelming your classes by introducing collaborators to help them fulfill their responsibilities. In this post, we’ll look at an example of using a collaborator to prevent non-domain responsibilities from creeping …
Test-Driving the Design of MVC Based Apps
Using tests to drive out the design of objects is an effective way to write code. By taking the perspective of a client, your objects will develop simple, and intuitive interfaces. In addition, the tests act as both documentation and an automated, regression test suite. In this post, we’ll outline a basic test-driven workflow for …
Combining Design and Development Stories in Tracker
Carbometer:Blog One of the fun things about working at Carbon Five is that we get a chance to work on product ideas we design and build ourselves. This gives us an opportunity to experiment with technologies and processes that interest us. Recently, I’ve been contributing to Carbometer:Blog, an information radiator that visualizes details about blog …
Agile for Startups
A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation entitled Agile for Startups to the companies in Startup UCLA, a startup accelerator program run by UCLA. I actually gave this talk a week after my colleague Lane Halley presented her talk to the same group. Agile for Startups from Michael Wynholds The talk went well, …
Seven Tips for Effective Customer Conversations
On July 18 I was the guest speaker at Startup UCLA, a summer accelerator program for UCLA entrepreneurs. I presented a new talk “Seven Tips for Effective Customer Conversations” and led the group in some exercises to practice core interview skills. Seven Tips for Effective Customer Conversations from Lane Halley Here’s a summary of the …