Building a Chat System – Part 3
If you’ve been following my series on building a chat system inside a mobile app, you’ve seen as I set up my Ionic framework and created a user in Azure Chat. Now it’s time to build the ability to store message data. We wouldn’t need to necessarily store all messages, but by doing so we…
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Don’t Panic Labs Named One of Lincoln’s “Best Places to Work” for 2023
Software product development company Don’t Panic Labs was recognized as one of Lincoln’s Best Places to Work at a ceremony at Haymarket Park on Thursday, June 15th. The company was recognized with the 2nd place award in the Medium-Sized Company category by Woods & Aitken LLP, the Lincoln Journal Star, and the Lincoln Human Resource…
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Sending Emails with Azure Communication Services
Sending emails is a pretty known technical space. Many of us have sent emails using a variety of services. One you maybe haven’t tried is Azure Communication Services, which is still in preview at the time of this blog post. Here’s how you set up Azure Communications to send emails from your applications. Create a…
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Working With Stripe’s SDK
Stripe is an e-commerce solution for supporting payments in your web applications. Integrating Stripe into your application is almost too easy, and their integrations put a very low barrier upon the integration. While their integration is easy and fast, you still do have to write some code to tie your system to the information in…
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Don’t Panic Labs Announces Its 2023 Towel Drive for People’s City Mission
Local software design and engineering company Don’t Panic Labs is excited to announce the return of its annual towel drive for Lincoln’s People’s City Mission. From May 15th to May 26th, Don’t Panic Labs is encouraging all of Lincoln to donate towels of any condition for use at the Mission’s shelter in Lincoln. Towels are…
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Building a Chat System – Part 2
In my previous post, we discussed setting up an Ionic front end to host chat functionality in an app. In this post, we will discuss creating a user in Azure chat. We will then create a token that the front end can use to send messages as this user. It is important to note that…
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Building a Chat System – Part 1
Chat applications are very common, especially in many larger applications. Building a chat application from scratch isn’t recommended in most cases because there are frameworks that make building them easier. In this blog post series, I will create a very simple chat application using Azure Communication Services. To start, we will create a rough front…
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Build vs. Buy: How to Decide When Adding Features to Your Software Project
Creating new software involves a lot of decisions. When adding features, a common question is whether to write custom code or buy an existing product. There isn’t a straightforward right or wrong answer. Many people will tell you there is, but that is too simplistic. Many factors can influence the decision. How capable is the…
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Finding Answers to Your Programming Questions
We all search the web for answers to our programming questions. Sometimes the answers are more engineering in nature, but sometimes it’s something simple. For example, how many columns can you put into a single table in SQL Server? The correct answer: 1,024. This led me to wonder how many columns you can put into…
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Generating Pre-signed URIs with Azure Blob Storage
It is common to have files stored in Azure Blob storage, but we occasionally need to allow others to access those files. Sometimes we need to allow someone to upload a file; other times, we need to allow someone to download a file. Either way, we usually only want to allow partial control of the…
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