Blog
The Latest from Our Team
Exceptions: Exceptionally Slow
For almost everything you do, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat crack an egg, and coding is no exception. Ask 1000 programmers to write the same program and they will write it 1000 different ways. Sometimes this can get you in trouble and oftentimes experienced coders will see pitfalls before they…
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Observations from the Backlog Management Team (aka Spencer Farley)
As the summer began to wind down, we asked that each intern team write about what they worked on, what they learned, and how this experience will affect the remainder of their formal education. In this post, Spencer Farley talks about how he – as a one-man team – spent the summer developing a backlog…
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Our Goals
When our summer interns started, I sat down with them to cover the nitty gritty details of what, why and how we do things at Don’t Panic Labs. I broke it down into three categories: our goals, what we value and what we expect. In what I envision as a series of posts, I’ll lay…
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Observations from the Beehive Mobile Intern Team
At the end of the summer, we asked each intern team write to about what they worked on, what they learned, and how this experience will affect the remainder of their formal education. This post is from the Mobile Beehive team embedded with Beehive Industries. Mobile Beehive team members are Avery Quandt and Tim Hoffman….
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Observations from the Coach Tablet Intern Team
As the summer begins to wind down for our intern teams, we asked that each one write about what their team worked on, what they learned, and how this experience will affect the remainder of their formal education. This post is from the Coach Tablet team embedded with EliteForm. Team members are Jed Dumire, Dalton…
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Observations from the Strength as a Service Intern Team
As the summer begins to wind down for our intern teams, we asked that each one write about what their team worked on, what they learned, and how this experience will affect the remainder of their formal education. This post is from the Strength as a Service (SaaS) team embedded with EliteForm. SaaS team members…
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Upgrading Projects to SQL 2012: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Experience is always a great teacher. And if I can learn something through experience I like to share it, especially if I can save others any amount of hassle. Case in point: our recent experience with upgrading to Microsoft SQL 2012 and how it affected our projects and nightly builds. Install This process is pretty…
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Exclude Those Unit Tests!
Do you have a unit test that you don’t want to run in the nightly build? No problem. Just add the TestCategory attribute to your test and give it a “DontRunWithBuild” name or something else memorable. In Visual Studio, go to the Team Explorer, right-click on the build you want to exclude and click Edit…
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Standup? What’s a Standup?
People will sometimes ask us how we get value from our daily standups. This got us thinking about why we do standups in the first place, what we want to get out of the standups, and why we think our standups work. For those not familiar with standups, they are brief meetings (usually about 10…
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Using Lucene.NET for Searching PDFs
Note: This post was co-authored by Emily Douglas. For one of our recent projects, we developed a public-facing website that needed the ability to search through a large number of archived PDFs. This may sound trivial, but we had some unique needs and situations we had to work around (isn’t that always how it is):…
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