-
Apprenticeship Diaries: From Ice Cream to Code
Follow along with our engineering apprentice Lauren Kessell as she documents her time at Upstatement. Welcome to the first installment of the Apprenticeship Diaries. I’m three months into my engineering apprenticeship at Upstatement, and I’m finally figuring out what I…
-
All About Apprenticeships: Engineering Edition
Upstatement’s long-running apprenticeship program is one of our favorite parts of the job. We’re often asked how the program works, why we do it, and what an apprentice can expect. Engineering manager Beatrice Huang is here with the answers. Most…
-
Pair Programming: Best Practices for Teams
Pair programming is productive and fun. Well, “fun-for-work” fun, at least. Our engineers share the ins and outs of pairing and how it led to a happier team and better work. If you read tech blogs, then you’ve no doubt…
-
Where are all the CarPlay Apps?
The unsung hero from Apple in the last few years has been CarPlay. It, with Android Auto, have taken over just about every new car’s dashboard touchscreen. It’s finally replaced the junky and ugly interfaces from the…
-
Cautionary Tales: More Career Advice from Upstatement
Straight from the Upstatement team, here are our favorite not-so-successful career moments—and the wisdom gained from those fails. We recently wrapped up a few projects with universities, and it’s got us in a back-to-school mindset—fresh starts,…
-
Learning to Learn: Career Advice from Upstatement
Find your niche, but also don’t be afraid to try everything. Upstatement has grown a ton over the past couple years. We’ve hired talented people who are at wildly varying stages in their lives and careers. Some of us finished…
-
Campfires, community, and code: Upstatement & HackBeanpot 2021
Community over competition. It’s both a codified value and rallying cry of HackBeanpot, an independent Boston-area nonprofit that organizes the self-titled hackathon each year. We’ve been proud sponsors for the last three, and when the event…
-
Making Service Journalism into a Product
How we designed and made Up the Block, a new type of digital news product for underserved communities. For years, Upstatement has collaborated with The Trace, the premier newsroom reporting on American gun violence. We’ve learned…
-
Design for Non-Profit News Websites: 3 Tips for a Successful Product Launch
This week we’re re-launching Grist, the latest in a series of non-profit journalism platforms. It’s inspiring to watch the space mature with new publishing models and areas of reporting. From this body of work—products like PBS NewsHour,…
-
Your Brand is a Story
When we think about a brand, we might imagine things like logos, colors, symbols, maybe even ideas like “a cartoon mouse,” or “fast and cool electric vehicles” or “smooth white plastic computers.” But these are merely brand artifacts; either the clothes that the brand wears or…