Articles on Process

A group of people sketching
Alexa Roman

Alexa Roman

Before You Build: How to Get Your Startup Off the Ground Without a Team

Photo from my colleague Yasmine Molavi’s sketching workshop You’re starting a company. You’re so full of ideas that you have three PowerPoint decks! Wowza! You have a couple co-founders or maybe even an employee. If only your team had some engineers to build the product… There are many, many important things you can do to

Yasmine Molavi

Yasmine Molavi

Flexing the Rules of Material Design

5 Steps to quickly differentiate your Android app design while being Material Design compliant.

Clark Cutler

Clark Cutler

CliffsNotes for Startups

Clients often ask us if there’s anything they should read about product development to get a head start on working with us. Here’s a list of some of our favorite books, with pointers to the best parts for our busiest clients (Brian, we’re looking at you). These recommendations apply to any entrepreneur not just to our clients.

Christian Nelson

Christian Nelson

Why We Are an Agile Shop

Last week we had a lively discussion about Agile development at Carbon Five. It was fun telling the story of how we got started with Agile nearly a decade ago. We discussed how it helps us deliver value and deal with the challenges we face as a services company. Here’s a summary of that conversation… How

Christian Bradley

Christian Bradley

The Socratic Method and Agile: Why we should question everything.

Like many agile shops, here at Carbon Five we use Pivotal Tracker to manage our stories. Stories are estimated and prioritized within typical “Current”, “Backlog”, and “Icebox” queues. Stories can be labelled to give them context, and one label I have seen applied to stories has gotten me thinking Greek. This label is a word

Christian Bradley

Christian Bradley

Speedy Test Iterations for Rails 3 with Spork and Guard

Overview TDD is fun, right? Rails enthusiasts and agile evangelists alike agree. Waiting for your tests to run, however, makes for a frustrating experience. When the time between test iterations is magnified by bloated tests it can be hard to maintain a purist’s test-driven approach. After looking into autotest, parallel testing, and in-memory databases, I

Jared Carroll

Jared Carroll

TDD your way to a richer domain model

A well established and accepted design principle in the Rails community is “skinny controller, fat model”. This involves placing an application’s domain logic in models and keeping the request handling controllers simple and sparse (i.e. “skinny”). The result is a more modularized, reusable, rich domain model. The following is an example of using TDD to

Alon Salant

Alon Salant

Play at Work for MCN in Austin, October 27

Dana Mitroff from SFMOMA and I are running a workshop October 27 at I/O: The Museum Inside-Out/Outside-In, the annual Museum Computer Network conference held this year in Austin, TX. The workshop is Play at Work: Applying Agile Methods to Museum Website Development. Our goal is to give attendees a taste of some of the novel

Andy Peterson

Andy Peterson

Ew… you got CSS in my Javascript

The other weekend I test drove a little Javascript library to output CSS style rules from within Javascript. I took the most obvious Javascript-literal approach to get the most out of Javascript support in editors. I called it Csster (“sister”), and it looks like: Csster.style({ h1: { fontSize: 18, color: ‘chartreuse’ } }); All it

Christian Nelson

Christian Nelson

We’re talking Agile at SFRuby…

Alon and I will be giving an hour talk about agile development next Wednesday at the SFRuby meetup: Agile software development provides a number of discrete practices to help you be a better programmer and a great provider of programming services to your clients, internal or external to your business. The continuous daily rigor of