Author: Chad Michel
Mocking with API Management
Today we live in a world of service-oriented architecture, often with some sort of single page application (SPA) or mobile application on the front end. Those clients call to our backends running in the cloud. This is pretty much the pattern we see in many of the systems we build today. A majority of systems…
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The Importance of Architecture Reviews
Knowing that you are staying on task isn’t an easy task 🙂 As we build solutions, it is easy to lose conceptual integrity along the way. There are few things more important to the success of a project than having a development team all on the same page. Fred Brooks (from Mythical Man-Month) put a…
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Visual Studio Angular Template with Full CLI Support
It is common for the team here at Don’t Panic Labs to use an Angular SPA that communicates with a .NET Core backend. Typically we have done so as two wholly separate projects: one for our .NET world and one for our Angular world. For a while, Microsoft has provided a Visual Studio template that…
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Top Ten Things Good Developers Love
10. Good requirements Developers like to know what they are building and why. Good requirements are critical to this and are essential for getting developers started right. Also, good requirements are essential for reducing rework. 9. Not being micromanaged Good developers don’t want someone watching each keystroke. They want feedback and guidance, but they…
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Top Ten Things Developers Hate
Developers are creators at heart. They like to create. A big part of the appeal of software development is the quick outputs from your work. You write code one day, and the next day it can be in a customer’s hands. How many other jobs have that quick of turnaround on effort? But many things…
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Quick Look – Azurite
Creating a good local development experience allows for developers to run independently, with no shared resources and few online connections. This way, developers can code while having a minimal impact on other developers. Now sometimes, you can’t get away without requiring developers to use the cloud while developing a system. One thing Azure does well…
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How to Self-Host a Web API with .NET Framework
Sometimes you just want to host an HTTP endpoint from your existing code. You may have an existing process, but you need some sort of HTTP way to interact with the running process. The advantage of hosting within an existing process isn’t obvious, but it allows us to deploy an HTTP endpoint without having to…
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Searching Word and PDF Documents with Elasticsearch and Apache Tika
Having the ability to search through a folder of documents, particularly Microsoft Word and PDF files, can be an excellent feature to build into systems. But how do you go about this? Which technologies can one use to bring this to life without a ton of effort? Based on my experience, leveraging a combination of…
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How to Set Up a Ruby On Rails Project in Visual Studio Online
Visual Studio Online isn’t just VS in the cloud, it gives you a quick sharable Linux development environment in the cloud. This makes setting up something like a Ruby On Rails development environment in the cloud a pretty easy task. Here’s how to get a Rails environment set up using VS Online. Begin by opening…
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Back to School: My Semester Lecturing at UNL
I have always enjoyed teaching people how to write software. And teaching people how to write software that runs in the cloud hits two passions of mine. This semester I am a guest lecturer at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, teaching a 400-level course on distributed cloud systems. I have taught courses at UNL…
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