Author: Chad Michel
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)…
Read more…
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…
Read more…
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…
Read more…
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…
Read more…
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…
Read more…
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…
Read more…
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…
Read more…
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…
Read more…
Apple: Make MacBooks Great Again
Dear Apple, I love my 2014 MacBook Pro. It has been a rock-solid development machine, especially when I’m building mobile apps. You’ve made it pretty rough to do iOS development on anything else, but I can let that slide because your hardware is sooo good. But as computers often do, mine is beginning to slow…
Read more…
Top Ten Signs You’re Doing Software Development Wrong
#10 – The build server always has a few failing tests Unit tests are a valuable piece to a layered approach to quality. But unit tests only have value if people see them as needing to always pass. The moment people stop caring about failing unit tests, they have lost their value. #9 –…
Read more…