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The Latest from Our Team
Automating Wordle with Cypress and GitHub Actions
Like many of you, I was introduced to the Wordle craze a few weeks ago by a peer who thought I was too focused on “actual work”. Naturally, I dropped everything to try this new game and then passed a link to the game around to my friends and family like a cursed videotape. It…
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Primitiveness
“Sufficiency, completeness, and primitiveness – Achieving sufficiency and completeness means ensuring that a software component captures all the important characteristics of an abstraction and nothing more. Primitive- ness means the design should be based on patterns that are easy to implement.” – SWEBOK V3.0, Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge Primitiveness is a…
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JavaScript Events: An Introduction
Yes, JavaScript Events. Without them, the world wide web would be a dystopian wasteland of static HTML. Without them, we’d still be relying on blink and marquee tags to jazz up our LiveJournals. Fortunately, this is not the case. The modern web runs on JavaScript, and JavaScript is driven by events. But what does it…
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APIs and the Cloud
Application programming interfaces (APIs) communicate into software. If user interfaces are ways for humans to interact with software, then APIs are ways for software to communicate with other software. As we write applications, our software makes extensive use of APIs. Sometimes those APIs are purely at a platform level, maybe file read and write. Sometimes…
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Canvas API
Canvas is one of the biggest names in the learning management software (LMS) space. It is used by major Universities across the country, and we use it for Nebraska Dev Lab and our Advanced Continuing Education. LMSs provide an online structure for courses and content. This online nature makes it easier to support remote learners….
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A History of Microsoft .NET, Part 11: .NET Core 5.0
.NET 5 was the unified .NET. It merged .NET Core and .NET Framework, or it kind of did. From a technology standpoint, .NET 5 supports more of what was missing in .NET Core without question. But .NET 5 was still missing things like a fully functioning WCF. It is hard to make software truly backward…
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Dysfunctional Teams
Teams is clearly an attempt by Microsoft to eat the space created by Slack, the product we used before Teams. We, like many people, switched to Teams because it was already included in our Office 365 subscription. Effectively using Teams instead of Slack saved us money. When Teams first came out, we tried it and…
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A History of Microsoft .NET, Part 10: Core 3.0/3.1
If .NET Core 2 was the first real version of .NET Core, then 3.0/3.1 took something usable and made it solid. With their latest version, Microsoft went from “good enough” to something enjoyable to use. .NET 3.0/3.1 closed a lot of the gaps left between .NET Framework and .NET Core. Not all of the gaps,…
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A History of Microsoft .NET, Part 9: Core 2.0/2.1
The release of .NET Core 2 was the first “real” version of .NET Core. The previous version (.NET Core 1) really wasn’t ready for primetime. But .NET Core 2 was a solid product. And in many ways, it was better than .NET Framework. First off, .NET Core 2 had all that was good about .NET…
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Using Postman
Postman is a tool most web application developers are familiar with. A lot of what we use Postman for we could write ourselves or use the Unix curl command. But Postman makes interacting with APIs easier for developers. Plus, its ability to save requests and collections is really useful. But why would we want this?…
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