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The Latest from Our Team
Don’t Panic Labs – The First 15 Years
April 2025 marks the 15th anniversary of the founding of Don’t Panic Labs. We are a software product development and innovation company in Nebraska that focuses on providing the necessary support, experience, and product development capacity to innovation groups and entrepreneurs to bring their innovative vision to life. In this blog post, I will be…
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Coding with AI: How to Get the Results You Actually Want
You can’t talk about software right now without talking about AI or, more accurately, LLMs. These are helping us write software faster. But can they help us be much faster? The common way they help us is by autocompleting code for us. I start writing a method called upsertUser, and then the AI will automatically…
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Getting Started with Monorepo
In my previous post, I covered my quest to build a shareable component library, using Vue 3. In this post, I will cover taking the current library and turning it into a Monorepo that can handle multiple libraries with Lerna. Prep the Repo To this: Note: You have a package.json file in the root folder…
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Core Use Cases
In this series, we are focusing on creating a software system. This has many steps. We created a mental model. Next, we got an overview of the project. Then, we gathered requirements and built an epic-level backlog. In this step, we are going to take those artifacts and break them down into core use cases…
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My First NPM Package
What follows is my quest to build a sharable component library using Vue 3. A project came along that required a way to share components between two Vue projects, but that was also supposed to lay the foundation for using some of the same components across more projects in the future. As this is a…
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The Struggle with Vue and ASP.NET Core
There is a wonderful template in Visual Studio to create a FullStack application that serves Vue 3 as the frontend and .NET core as the backend. Microsoft even provides a tutorial on it. But as usual, once you want to customize, things get complicated. I’ve spent hours trying to understand why I could not change…
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What Makes a Successful Developer Lead? A Guide for Aspiring and New Team Leads
Becoming a developer lead is an exciting step in your career. It’s a role that blends technical expertise with leadership and mentorship, making you the glue that holds your team together. Whether you’re stepping into this position for the first time or looking to refine your approach, here’s a guide to help you navigate the…
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The 8 Cs of a Software Architect
How do you think about roles and how people fit into roles? This question often arises when evaluating how someone fits into a particular role. No one is perfect or a perfect fit for any role. But the right people will fit most of a given role. It is valuable to have consistent ways to…
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My Favorite UX Books + Why (2025 Edition)
Nearly seven years ago, I published a blog post about my favorite user experience (UX) books. I figured it was time to revisit my list and share why these are my current favorites. Living with Complexity – Don Norman (2016), 308 pages Don Norman continues to be a thought provoking and grounding resource for me….
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Mocking Email Addresses for Testing
Many people I’ve talked to know how to find a dummy credit card number for testing. And if you don’t, here’s a link: https://docs.stripe.com/testing Fewer people that I’ve talked to know where to find dummy email addresses, and this info was more difficult for me to find online. If you’re working in a legacy codebase…
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