3 Things About Our Communitarian of the Month That Will Shock You

by 

|

|  

in

This month we are recognizing Paul Bauer. Here are three things Paul had to say about volunteering: I Met My Wife While Volunteering Volunteering is a great way to meet quality people and make new friends. I was lucky enough to meet my lovely wife during a volunteering experience in college. I can’t promise you…

Read more…

Non-Social Startups

by 

|

|  

in

We see a lot in the news about startups that seem to be primarily focused on social media and hype. Often, it seems they only want to acquire users but provide them no (or very little) value. But what we don’t hear about very much are what I like to call the “others”; the startups…

Read more…

Project Management – Iteration Planning and Daily Standups

by 

|

|  

in

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…

Read more…

We Love When People Learn to Code

by 

|

|  

in

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…

Read more…

Brian Zimmer – Communitarian of the Month

by 

|

|  

in

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…

Read more…

Project Management – How We Estimate

by 

|

|  

in

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…

Read more…

The Perfect Developer Laptop?

by 

|

|  

in

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…

Read more…

Project Management – Release Planning

by 

|

|  

in

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…

Read more…

Project Management – An Introduction to How We Do It

by 

|

|  

in

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…

Read more…

Ted Larsen – Communitarian of the Month

by 

|

|  

in

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….

Read more…