Author: Chad Michel
Creating a Barcode Scanner App with Ionic
Scanning a barcode or a QR code is a pretty common business request. Luckily, almost all users walk around with devices capable of scanning barcodes: their phones. In this blog post, we are going to step through creating a mobile scanner application using Ionic, Xcode, and an iPhone. Create a blank app called “IonicCamera”: ionic…
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How NOT to Choose a JS Framework
There are a ton of articles out there on how to choose a JavaScript framework. This article is not one of them. Instead, I’ve written this article to provide some guidance that should help you NOT choose a particular JS framework. Often, the correct choice is no JS framework at all. If you are just…
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Good Fake Data
When it comes to testing your code, good data is hard to come by. For new greenfield solutions, there often is no data. And using production data is a bad idea for a variety of reasons. But that doesn’t reduce the importance of good test data. We need good test data, and good (read: realistic)…
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The Art of Data Contract Design
At Don’t Panic Labs, we care a lot about building software that can survive the test of time. We don’t care to build software that has to be thrown away after a couple of years. That focus on building sustainable software allows us to help deliver on “enabling sustainable business agility.” The basic principle from…
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Automated Testing – Executive Summary
Automated testing is something developers talk a lot about. But what is automated testing, and why is it important? Unit testing usually means testing a piece of software in isolation, away from the rest of the code base. Sometimes this entire topic falls under the broad heading of unit testing. Unit testing typically doesn’t include…
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Hangin’ Around with Hangfire
.NET Core is awesome. Better performance, cleaned up interfaces, what’s not to like? Well, in the cloud world some things just aren’t there yet. For example, if you want to use WebJobs for async processing you might have some problems with .NET Core (at least as of June 2018). WebJobs provide a super easy way…
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Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms, Part 1
Dave Kovic is my favorite modern president. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the real president; President Mitchell was the real president. Xamarin allows us to create mobile applications that appear to be fake applications. But unlike Dave, Xamarin apps are real. Xamarin.Forms allows you to write one application that runs on both iOS and Android. The goal…
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Database Change Control – Executive Summary
We have spent a good amount of time discussing database change control. Why? Why should we care? Why not just let people manually deploy things to SQL? The answer is four-fold: Repeatability Trackability Maintainability Ties application code to the database code Repeatability Ideally, we want the ability to quickly rebuild our environments. We want a…
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DPL Education – Adding Product Search
Search is an essential part of any e-commerce application. If you don’t believe me, go to amazon.com. How hard is it to find the search box? Pretty easy, right? If search is essential, we need to make it work pretty well in our applications. Our Software Design and Development Clinics focus on teaching engineers the…
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Getting Started with Swagger API
Years ago, we had something called ASMX web services. While I wouldn’t want to go back to those, they did have some advantages over the current way many APIs are created. Back in the ASMX days, you got a pretty well-defined contract for interacting with web services. Today if someone is setting up a Web…
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