Articles on development
Taming Technical Debt
You, fellow software engineer, have probably felt the same as I have: while coding some big feature, you find a thing that is inefficient, unreadable, deprecated, confusing, or just buggy. Maybe it’s not bad code at all — you just realize that several packages are out of date, or your framework needs to be upgraded. …
How to Facilitate an Effective Retro
Does your product development team do a weekly retrospective? At Carbon Five, we think it’s the most important meeting of the week. Here are some tactical suggestions for facilitating a retro, so your team understands their challenges, celebrates their successes, and comes away with an actionable to-do list.
Idea: GenServers with Map-based state
I recently gave a talk at Empex LA in which I talked about my desire to see simplifications and enhancements to using some of the OTP behaviors offered in Elixir. In this post I’m going to explore a simple improvement to the GenServer API that would make it a little easier to work with. GenServers …
Pairing Retro
Back at my first job in tech, we paired 95% of the time. Many people were new to pairing. As it was my first job, I was relatively one of the more junior people on the team, which is an especially difficult position to be in for pairing. It was an incredibly intense experience for …
Safely Migrating from Paperclip to Active Storage
Active Storage was introduced into Rails version 5.2. It is a highly anticipated addition to handle integrations with asset management such as AWS S3. For a long time, the field has been dominated by outside gems, including Paperclip, which has been around longer than many people have been Rails developers. Now that Active Storage has …
Finding the Right Company Fit
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 …
New Arrow Functions in ES6!
Among many of the new features of ES6, aka ECMAScript 2015, is the arrow function expression, also known as the fat arrow function. For those that have been programming in CoffeeScript, the syntax will look quite at home. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. …
Introducing Tinderbox
Check out our new meetup Tinderbox. We created Tinderbox because we wanted a forum about creating products using software (and sometimes custom hardware). Tinderbox is technology agnostic because we all use a variety of tech to build things. At Carbon Five, we’re building with Ruby, JavaScript (client and server) and Objective-C/iOS, but we dabble with …