Author: Chad Michel
Book Review: Range
Like many readers, I have enjoyed many of Malcolm Gladwell’s books. His book Outliers has been very influential on our culture’s thoughts. The 10,000-hour rule is known by most of us at this point; it has almost become a rule that people believe to be true. But in the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in…
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NDepend: Powerful Static Code Analysis
How do you effectively evaluate a software solution? This is a question commonly heard in software development. It reminds me of a question posed in Caddyshack, “How do you compare yourself to other golfers?”, to which Chevy Chase responds with, “By height.” Analysis of a system usually requires a lot of leg work, poring through…
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Apple Says “No” to UIWebView, Ionic Counters with Capacitor
Apple continually updates its products and technologies. While that’s usually a thing to relish, it sometimes comes at a cost. One such recent change is the UIWebView component. Apple has warned developers that UIWebView is deprecated, and at some point, they will stop allowing app store submissions for applications that use it. If you need…
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Spooky Tales from the Dev Side
Software development can be a pretty scary business. Things randomly break, and you sometimes don’t even know why. Since Halloween is this week, let’s look at some examples from people here at Don’t Panic Labs. When Optimizations Don’t The first is something many of us have experienced: everything in production works fine…until it doesn’t. In…
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Working for Steaks
Ribeye steaks are one of my favorite things. Not sirloins, not New York strips, but ribeyes. I love a good fatty steak cooked with salt, pepper, and compound butter. Very tasty. So, of course, I was happy when we got to work with the Nebraska Cattlemen Association. The application we built with Cattlemen provides a…
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Quick Thoughts on My Time at the IDesign Architecture Clinic
Doug Durham, Andy Unterseher, and I recently returned from an IDesign Architecture Clinic held in Kansas City. This week-long class was taught by Michael “Monty” Montgomery, who has a very engaged and driven approach to education. He provided a lot of real-world / from the trenches feedback that I certainly appreciate. We started the week…
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Hello .NET Core 3.0
.NET Core 3.0 shipped a couple of weeks ago, and it seems that Microsoft continues to improve this often-used technology and the lives of developers. We here at Don’t Panic Labs have been using a flavor of .NET Core 2.x on most of our projects for the last year or so. Seeing the continued improvement…
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Mobile Development Checklist
Since we build quite a few mobile apps, we’re familiar with the many hoops you must jump through to ensure the process goes as smoothly as possible. Here’s my list of things to do and consider about before starting your mobile product development. Name your product. Think through those annoying things such as bundle identifiers…
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Is Teams Microsoft’s Sleeper Hit?
Microsoft has built a lot of products that many of us use every day: Windows, Office, Visual Studio, Azure, and Xbox. They’ve all been hits, but there’s one product that is quickly building steam and I expect will become their next big success story: Microsoft Teams. A few years ago, it felt like everyone was…
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More Engineers, Please — Things That Need to Change in Software Development
Hiring software developers is hard work; any employer looking to fill developer roles will tell you that. This is made more difficult by the number of employers looking to onboard new hires while, at the same time, there are few developers looking for a job. Finding a good developer is tough. And making the problem…
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