Blog
The Latest from Our Team
A Developer’s Migration Story: Moving from Windows Desktop to MacBook Pro with Parallels
At the beginning of 2015, the developers here at Don’t Panic Labs were given the option to choose any notebook or tablet computer to call our own. We wanted to encourage mobility and the freedom to work from different spaces when desired. We ended up with a good spread around the office – many choosing…
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DPL Reading List – April 17, 2015
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week. A Rare Interview With Graphic Design Legend Massimo Vignelli – “From 2006, the late designer shares the story behind his infamous New York subway map and why typographic elegance will prevail.” iPhone Killer: The Secret History of the Apple Watch –…
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Safely Stopping Windows Services
Here’s yet another post of simple code samples that provides an elegant solution to a common problem. When it comes to Windows services, I often find myself writing apps that are required to perform a task at a predetermined interval. Do this every 5 minutes, do that once a day. It’s very easy for a…
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DPL Reading List – April 10, 2015
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week. The Cost of Continuously Checking Email (Thanks to Steve Kiene for recommending this article) – “Shifting our attention from one task to another, as we do when we’re monitoring email while trying to read a report or craft a presentation, disrupts…
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Why We Love Microsoft
So, I recently sent out a company-wide email regarding our firm’s favorite apps. I expected to see some obscure technical responses or maybe a couple Spotify-like cultural ones, but I did not expect to hear so much about Microsoft. Actually, I was shocked by what was returned. Of the responses, almost all of them referenced…
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DPL Reading List – April 3, 2015
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week. Generational Performance Comparison: Amazon EC2’s C3 and C4 Families – “Amazon released the latest generation of its public cloud service in January 2015. Cloud Spectator recently test the Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) C4 family to evaluate any potential performance and price-performance…
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Project Management – How We Do It
Project management is how software companies manage their various overlapping development efforts while building great software. Likewise, a project manager oversees those efforts. Taking notes, tracking progress, recording milestones, and holding meetings are just a few tasks project managers handle every day. At Don’t Panic Labs, that’s been my role for nearly five years and…
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Nebraska Code Follow-up
We were overwhelmed by the attendance and response to the presentation we gave at the 2015 Nebraska Code conference on how we approach product development at Nebraska Global / Don’t Panic Labs. It was great to have so many people interested in what we do and how we do it. Afterwards, we were asked by…
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Thoughts on ‘Generation STEM’ from the Girl Scout Research Institute
The STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields are important. One of the saddest realities of our field is the huge drop in the percentage of women in computer science over the past few decades. The Girl Scouts Research Institute took a good look at why that’s happening and how to change it. (PDF) After surveying…
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Rounded Corners with Transparent Backgrounds in WPF
Rounded corners for a WPF app can give it an impressive look. But problems can arise when you don’t have attributes on the window set up quite right. For example, we have a white background that’s killing the corner roundness. Luckily there’s an easy way to get rid of that. First, set the AllowsTransparency property…
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