Author: Chad Michel
Azure Face, Part 1
Azure is pretty amazing. It has services for almost everything. And did you know that Azure even has the ability to recognize faces? Azure Face is a pretty fantastic facial recognition service. Ten years ago, it would have seemed almost magical. But today, you can recognize faces in images using a cloud service with very…
Read more…
A Capstone Project for Good: Teamwork, Communication, and Success
If you keep up with the happenings of Don’t Panic Labs, you’re likely aware of the Nebraska Dev Lab Pipeline Program. It is an educational partnership between us and Doane University. Our goal is to help address the shortage of software development talent in Nebraska by turning a small cohort into quality, entry-level software developers….
Read more…
How NOT to Wait for an Online Meeting to Begin (and What to do Instead)
While waiting for online meetings to start, we often find ourselves passing that time in various ways. Unfortunately, this can distract us and possibly lead to us not being as engaged as we should be. There are things you absolutely should avoid doing while waiting for others to join an online meeting. As a person…
Read more…
A Super Simple JWT Example
Need to set up a JSON Web Token (JWT) in a project with a .NET Core 3.1 backend? Here’s a quick and dirty example of how to do it. First, create a Web Application project. After we have a web application project, we are already pretty close to done. .NET makes this process easy. The…
Read more…
A Proxy Controller for Managers?
All of the systems we design use essentially the same layered architecture. Our top layer is the manager layer. That layer is often consumed directly from our controllers in our ASP.NET projects. This usually results in us writing many thin methods that just call our managers. But what if we didn’t have to write those…
Read more…
JWT Verification Outside of an ASP.NET Application
JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) are common in today’s web-based world. The notion of JWTs works really well inside of the SPA to Web API world that many of us are currently developing. In these systems, the JWT is created by the user when the signs into the system. After sign-in, a JWT is created and…
Read more…
Using ASP.NET Identity in a Console App? Yes You Can!
Microsoft’s ASP.NET framework provides a really easy way to add authentication to your applications. For a classic web application, you almost don’t have to do anything. Just check a couple of check boxes and you are good to go. But did you know it’s possible to add ASP.NET user authentication to a console application? Luckily…
Read more…
Firebase Emulator!
Having the flexibility to do local development is essential for successful projects. While we have successfully completed projects without a good local development story, I feel we often regret it. Without a good local development story, we often have multiple developers sharing cloud resources. When developers share cloud resources we often end with contention over…
Read more…
We Are Building on Sand
As a software community, we suffer the fate of a million little cuts. We build systems built on top of other code, layers upon layers upon layers. And, unfortunately, each layer isn’t very solid. This last week while teaching some students, I ran into a seemingly small issue with an Azure Function. Azure Functions are…
Read more…
Many Hands Make Light Work…Sometimes
The adage “Many hands make light work” is something we often take for granted. If we get a lot of people working together on a particular task, we can quickly knock it out. Think of stocking shelves as an example. The more people you have, the quicker you can unload a truck and get the…
Read more…