Author: Chad Michel
Using LocalStack
Local development is always a priority for us at Don’t Panic Labs. We want a great local development experience because it allows each developer to work independently. Part of having a great local development experience means having all the tools you need on your developer machine. If you are running a system that needs access…
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Azure DevOps Delivery Plans
Designing projects is challenging, which is probably a big reason why some people don’t even try. But just because something is difficult doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. Sometimes the most valuable things we do are difficult, and often the value in software development is in the difficult parts. Designing projects has a few obvious…
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Using the Harvest API
Anyone who does consulting is keenly aware of the importance of time tracking. Harvest is an excellent tool for logging time for projects. It’s the system we use here at Don’t Panic Labs, and we’ve found it to be both low friction and highly valuable. But there may be times when you want to use…
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I Want My .NET Maui!
There is something really appealing about native applications. As a user, having a “real” application – as opposed to a web application – often feels better. Native applications feel like a real piece of productive software. Maybe that’s why I enjoy working on them. I know that my work will produce something I might enjoy…
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GitHub Actions and a C# AWS Lambda
GitHub is the standard for online source control. It was really the first platform many of us knew about for the hosting of git in the cloud, and we have all used it at some point. At Don’t Panic Labs, we have been using Azure Dev Ops more than GitHub during the last few years….
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Latest Updates from Nebraska Dev Lab
When we began thinking about what would become the Nebraska Dev Lab Pipeline Program, we had one goal: create more software developers in Nebraska. But as time went on and we took a hard look at the state of the industry, we realized that we could also make an impact by helping to create a…
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Building Serverless Applications in C# with AWS Lambda
Hosting your backend solution used to be pretty straightforward for .NET developers. You were basically writing an ASP.NET website that was hosted in IIS. Today there are a lot of options, of which IIS is still one of them. Many of the web applications we write today end up hosted in either Azure App Services…
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How To: Sending Emails with Mailgun
Sending emails is a common feature in software these days. A user signs up, we send an email. A user places an order, we send an email. This sort of action happens all over. So it isn’t surprising that as software developers, it’s pretty common for us to include email functionality in the systems we…
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Reading Code Reviews from the Azure DevOps API
Code reviews are one of the best things you can use as a proxy for how things are going on a project. Just the lack of code reviews is very telling. But how long it takes to do code reviews can also be telling, as can the size of code reviews. If you have to…
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A History of Microsoft .NET, Part 6: 4.0 (Parallel, Dynamic)
.NET Framework 4, in some ways, is “the” .NET. This is when .NET felt like a super solid platform that didn’t need anything else. It was great. Ironically, I don’t think .NET 4 added much over .NET 3.5, but it felt like a clean solution was fully brought together. It was released alongside Visual Studio…
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