Our vision is to build a fairer future by providing a better understanding of the past.

We believe that past mistakes shouldn’t determine future job prospects. Our team works with several organizations focused on re-entry and education programs operating inside prisons. We have an internal committee, Bounce Back To Work, that meets weekly to focus on outreach and collaboration with different organizations across the country, helping get people with criminal records back into the job market. Every quarter, a few engineers volunteer to help teach valuable software and coding skills to inmates at San Quentin, helping them earn 30x more money than with the typical manufacturing jobs available while incarcerated.

We care about our clients outside of our 9-5.

We have regular educational and fun meetups and events at our HQ in NYC and in cities across the U.S. For example, our “Wine and Learn” events include topics like Investing 101, The Art of Travel Hacking, and How to Meal Prep on a Budget. In addition to weekly events and webinars, we have monthly “Regional Money Tribe” meetups in various cities at bars or coworking spaces. These are run by enthusiastic clients (anyone who wants to raise their hand) and we reimburse them for the costs. Engineers are more than welcome to participate in these events, in-person and remotely.

What’s more, we strongly believe our services shouldn’t be off-limits to those in need. For instance, during the government shutdown, we paused membership dues for those affected. We also have an awesome puzzle wall of donations and we give those funds to clients in need.

We belong to the open source community ourselves and many of our consumers do too.

For us, there is little separation between our developer community, and ourselves. Additionally, we host Meet-ups in New York, San Francisco, and we recently announced our new meet-ups in Japan, Buenos Aires, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Bangalore. We hosted a Blockstack Summit in Berlin in March 2018, and announced the Decentralize the World Tour. (The next stop is Hong Kong!) Our larger community can be found on Github, Slack, Twitter, and our Blog, just to name a few.

We share a common desire to make a tangible impact on real people.

There are over a million ways to make an impact on someone, and no way is better or more meaningful than the other. At Alto, we have an overarching desire to “help the world,” and tackle an outrageously high medication non-adherence rate (the rate at which people don’t take their medication properly, or at all). However, we are largely motivated and inspired by connecting with the individuals we’re trying to help. That’s why we take so much pride in our Yelp reviews, have a Slack bot that posts every survey response we get from a patient, and why once a month, we volunteer at the SF Marin Food Bank. We want to be in touch with and give back to our community, personally and face-to-face. This is the common denominator across all members at Alto; we bond with one another as a result of bonding with our community, even when that means repackaging 3,000 pounds of cashews at the Food Bank.

At this stage, we work closely with every city planner and considering every person who uses public transit in that city. We belong to the communities we serve.

We love bringing together planners to share best practices. That’s why we’ve recently started working together with several of our customers to host Regional Workshops to connect our transit planning community to each other. We even hosted our first Bay Area Remix Training right here in our San Francisco office. When you live in a place with as many transit agencies as the Bay Area, ongoing coordination between agency staff is a critical element to provide seamless service to customers. We were joined by transit planners from seven agencies across the region including AC Transit, County Connection, Union City Transit, Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority, WestCat, and Santa Rosa Citybus. We spent an afternoon discussing local projects, Remix best practices, and even a bonus session on how Remix works, under the hood.

During the Remix best practices session, we opened up Remix maps in each participant’s city and talked through a project, garnering feedback from the group in terms of ideas and tips specific to Remix. The group also got to hear about a few secrets that we’ll be excited to share in more detail in just a few months.

We are actively engaged in every stage of shaping local communities.

Investing in the development of our region always proofs to be valuable for us. We sponsor and organise tech conferences: DataMass summit, AnalyticsConf, or 3cityNetConf. Our experts give talks on many topics, such as data warehousing and .NET development. Maciej (our co-founder) is a leader of a SQLServer user group. We are also one of the sponsors of a local .NET chapter. It is during those events we get a chance to meet our future employees. In our opinion, dynamic community creates a competitive edge for local companies.

Our team regularly visits conferences, meetups, and other local events, sometimes also virtual events.

We try to engage with the community on to see where the development of the tools and frameworks we use will lead to, and also to exchange ideas with others. Conferences include the PHPBenelux Conference, Dutch PHP Conference, ConFoo and ZendCon. We also have a local PHP User Group in Mannheim that we support and sometimes host in our own offices. Organizing and hosting unKonf allows us to interact with, support, and help build up our community.

Last year, Stephan presented a session on NomadPHP, which is a virtual user group for developers that does not have a local user group in their area, as well as with NomadMage, a similar version but for the Magento Community. We have traveled to different user groups and conferences to demo our open source contributions as well as connect with the local communities.

We encourage everyone to write blogs, give talks, and contribute to the community in any way.

Our team members speak at conferences all over the country including Railsconf, ElixirConf, QCon, O’Reilly, Strangeloop, SXSW, Lean Startup Conference, Pluralsight Live, among many others. We have a group within the company called Outreach for people to help come up with ideas for talks and review talks. Speaking allows you to distill your knowledge down into something that is accessible to others, become a part of the greater community, and mentor and inspire others in the community. We also provide assistance for travel. For example, one of our engineers, Anna, is on the board of RailsBridge and runs ElixirBridge, and we fly her around the country to do Elixir workshops on the weekends.

To many of the developers at Carbon Five, speaking at conferences is important on a personal level. Courtney, who supports a variety of initiatives like Railsbridge, Women Who Code, and Balanced Team, says “I think seeing women on stage speaking about something that they know showcases that there is a body of work that a diverse set of humans is responsible for. To me, that is the greatest opposing argument to the anti-diversity mindset. Plus, it’s just fun.”

More locally, we also host a speaker series and hack night that is open to the community. We host many events and invite you to come.

Our relationship with our users can be best captured by how we came to hire Haris.

Haris was a PM at Curbside (a company in San Francisco), and also a Universe user. He loved the product so much and wanted to help grow the community of users who loved it as much as he did. When I, Joe, first met Haris, we weren’t hiring for a full-time community role, but after many conversations, we decided to create that role for Haris. Our 5th hire is devoted to building, supporting, and growing our community of users.

We are all users of our own product and we all interface with Universe’s other users every day. We all do customer support. We also have a tab in our app called Explore where we highlight some of the best creations from our users, and we have a lot more coming soon on this front.

What we’ve heard from our community is that they love their sites but they want more people to see them. They want to engage with other creators in our community. We’re now building out the ‘network’ side of Universe, so that creators can engage with each other and build their audiences inside of Universe.

Good developers will always want to work with other good developers.

We encourage anyone here to talk in tech events and we help covering costs to make this happen. We learned from open source and now we want to give back to the current and next generation of developers, so anything built here can (and should!) be open sourced.

We are not happy with the current technical level that most events in Brazil sets, so we plan on making our own tech events and maybe even conferences to be able to spread sparse knowledge about what we and other companies built. By "sparse knowledge" we mean real life problems and solutions for large scale software.

We believe in being involved in the community and using our position to improve the places we live.

Our CEO sits on the board of a local nonprofit and every office has a budget they can use to support local causes and events they are passionate about. Our annual user group always has a raffle or donation request for a cause we believe in. Last year we asked all of our attendees to bring gloves or winter clothes for the Chill Foundation that helps inspire youth to overcome challenges through snowboarding. Learn more about how we volunteer at Inntopia!

We are proud to be based in Oakland and be a part of the business community here.

The business landscape in Oakland is much smaller than it is in San Francisco and in the rest of Silicon Valley, and we like being a part of it. Oakland as a city is a community-driven and grassroots. We often go to First Fridays every month together as a company (as it’s right down the street from our office), do our best to participate in building up Oakland’s tech community.

We host monthly Coffee and Code meetups for the Oakland chapter of Girl Develop It. We’re partnering with Code Nation for annual summer internship programs. Code Nation equips students in under-resourced schools with the fundamental coding skills and professional experiences that together create access to careers in technology. We highly recommend other companies to participate!

We were torn between this and the “Customer Comes First” value tag because they go hand in hand for us.

Serving our customers is synonymous with serving our reddit community. In terms of engineering practices and routines, this means that every big change we make is announced in r/announcements, r/modnews, and r/changelog and before any of our big launches, we get beta user feedback for weeks beforehand. In fact, there have been times that we actually pull features out as a result of feedback from our beta users.

We engage with our reddit community IRL too. Our People & Culture Team recently hosted a panel for women in tech, where Tia Caldwell (Engineering Manager at Netflix), Nancy Hang (SVP of Product at Hipmunk), and Cynthia Slavens (Director of Mastering & Operations at Pixar) spoke about the paths that led them to their current positions. Whether it’s meeting other redditors at a Global Reddit Meetup or attending panels we host at HQ, we encourage everyone to be your own customer.