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DPL Reading List – March 22, 2019
An Exclusive Look at an Original iPhone Prototype – “At first glance, the red iPhone M68 prototype board looks like a motherboard you’d find inside a PC from more than 10 years ago. It’s roughly the same size, but the components are a little different. Apple developed this particular board, an engineering validation test (EVT)…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 3: Framework for Structured Critical Thinking
Have you ever wrestled with a problem in your mind and then, while trying to explain it to someone else, had an epiphany of how to solve it? This has happened to me on numerous occasions. Or have you ever jumped in to develop some code for a piece of business logic that you felt…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 2: Story/Task Decomposition and Estimation as Design
In my first post of this series, I discussed how ambiguity and lack of shared understanding between members of a product development team can occur when we rely on unstructured, ad hoc, and abstract communication processes (i.e., conversations and high-level user stories) for expressing our thoughts and ideas. We feel like we are painting a…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 1
I was recently re-introduced to one of my favorite essays, Why We Should Build Software Like We Build Houses, by Leslie Lamport. Leslie is one of several thought leaders within our industry who I really admire, both for his insights into the nature of software design as well as for his contributions in terms of…
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Getting Started with Azure B2C Identity Management
Users are essential for software, but managing users isn’t a unique value-add we are often providing with our software. Letting someone else manage users for us makes a lot of sense and saves many headaches. Thankfully there are many services that do this really well. One of those services is Azure Active Directory B2C. In…
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DPL Reading List – March 15, 2019
Here are some of the new and interesting articles we found this week. The World Wide Web Turns 30: Our Favorite Memories from A to Z – “Over the past 30 years, major portions of the web have come and gone. They’ve made us laugh and cringe, let us waste time and find friends, and…
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Beer && Code: One of Our Favorite Local Meetups
One of the great things about Lincoln is its growing number of educational opportunities centered around technology and software development. One of them is near and dear to our hearts: Beer && Code. Started by Don’t Panic Labs software engineer Branden Barber (aka Beebs around the office), this monthly get-together meets at various locations around…
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Product Design Lifecycle, Part 2: Scope + Structure
One of the toughest and most critical steps of the product design lifecycle is the Scope definition stage. It also happens to be where so many people go wrong—roughly 29% of the projects get it right and succeed according to the Standish Group’s Chaos Report. Scoping isn’t something that you can spend a day doing…
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DPL Reading List – March 8, 2019
Here are some of the new and interesting articles we found this week. Stressed at Work? Mentoring a Colleague Could Help – “So if mentoring is to help mentors, organizations need to account for the resources allocated to mentoring and allow flexibility for those mentoring relationships to grow. Those that commit to mentoring might be…
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Setting Up iOS Push Notifications for Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
iOS push notifications are often a requirement for mobile applications. But this feature isn’t easy to set up. It involves several steps across various applications, online and locally. And if you’re developing for multiple platforms (i.e., iOS and Android), you can be in for even more work. But with Amazon’s Simple Notification Service (SNS), you…
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