Project Time at Carbon Five
It has been two weeks so it is time for another Hack Night at Carbon Five. Before our space fills up with hungry hackers, we like to set aside 4 hours of project time for employees to work on their own projects and pair with others to cross pollinate teams.
Ongoing projects
This week I was excited to see Ben, Christian, and Jim working on a project to extract additional metrics from Pivotal Tracker event data. Ben has been collecting statistics on Tracker activity for several of our current projects. They hope to gather empirical data to back up some of our opinions about what warning signs we can see in tracker projects. How consistent are our story estimates? How does the time taken to accept or reject delivered stories correlate with project velocity? I’m sure we will hear more from them as the project continues.
Mike Perham has been preparing for his presentation at RubyConf on Threads and Actors in Ruby. He also took time to get Dalli and some of his other gems running on Travis-CI.
James has been thinking about better CSS practices and continued working on examples of how we could write more maintainable styles. I’m sure we’ll see the result of his efforts on the blog.
Jon has been trying to find better screen sharing and teleconferencing tools for us to use when we collaborate between our San Francisco and Los Angeles offices. We are also experimenting with recording our weekly brown bag lunch discussions and lightning talks so advice on a good hardware setup from experienced podcasters would probably be helpful.
We have occasionally discussed the value and feasibility of offering internship positions either internally or with our clients and Jon was nice enough to put together some estimates of the financial cost and benefits of supporting interns. Hopefully he can transform those into a form we can share publicly. I’d certainly be curious to hear about other companies’ experience supporting internships.
Clark continued to set an example of following our growing design practice by conducting user interviews of several other Carbon Five developers. He’s hoping to use those results to help us come up with a better company presence and promotion at the conferences we sponsor and participate in.
Next time: half-day hackathons
We’ll be back in two weeks on August 24th when we’re using our dedicated project time to host a half day hackathon in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. Hopefully we’ll see you there.
