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The Latest from Our Team
Project Management – Iteration Planning and Daily Standups
This is the fourth part of my series explaining how Don’t Panic Labs approaches project management through the lens of a software release cycle. At this point we have our items identified, estimated, and ordered for the release. It’s now time to schedule our iterations. We generally use one week iterations, which we’ve found to…
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We Love When People Learn to Code
We love when people learn to code and we love teaching folks to code. It’s a great investment in ourselves and our community. Omaha Code School has been in the news lately. They have quite the space. But, like true hipsters, we thought of this first. 🙂 Here are some fun facts about Lincoln Code…
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Brian Zimmer – Communitarian of the Month
This month we are recognizing Don’t Panic Labs’ General Manager Brian Zimmer. Here’s what he told us when we asked about his volunteer experiences. Why do you volunteer? It’s my turn to give back to my community. During my life, I’ve been fortunate to have multiple people volunteer in ways that helped me grow. Some…
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Project Management – How We Estimate
This is the third part of my series explaining how Don’t Panic Labs approaches project management through the lens of a software release cycle. We’ve just finished up initial release planning and have given Rough Order of Magnitude (ROM) estimates to each work item. We came up with a way of estimating that’s worked well…
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The Perfect Developer Laptop?
I have been using a laptop as my primary machine since about 1998. I have traditionally bought the fastest, biggest screen, biggest hard drive, most RAM beast I could find. I started with Apple laptops and then made the switch to Wintel after a few years. I usually bought a new machine every year or…
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Project Management – Release Planning
This is the second part of my series explaining how Don’t Panic Labs approaches project management through the lens of a software release cycle. How we approach release planning varies, but for this post I’ll focus a common approach we use: Themed Release Cycles. When we begin talking about an upcoming release, we look to…
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Project Management – An Introduction to How We Do It
Project management is a job that I find challenging and fulfilling, especially when one considers the various methodologies and philosophies that exist around managing software development projects. There’s no “one way” to approach project management. We have many tools in our toolbox and evaluate each project to determine how best to approach it. It’s part…
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Ted Larsen – Communitarian of the Month
This month we are recognizing IT engineer Ted Larsen. Here’s what he told us when we asked about his volunteer experiences. Why do you volunteer? I’m an overachiever AND completely awesome as well. I always sat in the front row at school and at the back of the bus on the way home. Not really….
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Dynamic Splash Screens in WPF
There’s a lot going on when an EliteForm PowerTracker starts up. Some of it isn’t our code, but some of it is. Here’s a high-level list of what happens: Load PowerTracker Load environment file Register events Initialize background workers Initialize queues Retrieve saved user options Check internet connectivity Fetch team data and icons from the…
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Paul Havel – Communitarian of the Month
This month we are recognizing IT manager Paul Havel. Here’s what he told us when we asked about his volunteer experiences. Why do you volunteer? Volunteering lets me directly connect with the community and the nonprofits that do so much to sustain it. It’s hard to beat the feeling you get from helping out and…
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