Author: Doug Durham
Don’t Panic Labs – The First 15 Years
April 2025 marks the 15th anniversary of the founding of Don’t Panic Labs. We are a software product development and innovation company in Nebraska that focuses on providing the necessary support, experience, and product development capacity to innovation groups and entrepreneurs to bring their innovative vision to life. In this blog post, I will be…
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The SWEBOK and Its Applications for Software Developers
Musings On Career Development in Software I have spent a fair amount of time over the last 5-10 years thinking about how our industry views and supports professional development. My own journey has given me an opportunity to see and experience what it takes to go from no education (other than a FORTRAN class in…
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A Snapshot of Software Developer Maturity and Non-coding Skills
What skills and knowledge are developers lacking? How do developers view their current skill sets? How do we help developers add to their toolbox of skills? How can we promote better software engineering practices? At a time when qualified development talent is at a premium, any organization with a development team must be asking these…
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Our Next Bold Move
It is a very exciting day for us at Don’t Panic Labs. Today, we are announcing that we have completed the purchase of investment fund Nebraska Global’s interest in the company. I’m not sure how to put this other than saying that this is a big deal. Perhaps it’s as significant as the steps taken…
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Get to Know SWEBOK
Note: This post was originally published on Doug’s website on July 20, 2021. Last week, I had the privilege to give the opening keynote at the 2021 Nebraska.Code() conference. My topic was Musings on Developer Maturity and Growth where I laid out a model for creating developer maturity proto-personas using IEEE’s Guide to the Software…
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Introducing the Don’t Panic Labs Advanced Continuing Education Program
Businesses across the country have adjusted to the realities of our current environment. Don’t Panic Labs is no exception. While our professional services business made adjustments to remote work rather quickly, continuing our Software Design and Development Clinics required some additional thought and effort. These classes were designed around in-person settings, so their structure needed…
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A Time to Listen and Learn: A Message from CEO Doug Durham
The countless tragic deaths, most recently of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and the recent violence we have seen play out have reinforced the need for our society to participate in some difficult conversations about who we are and who we want to be. As we witness powerful expressions of grief and anger…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 3: Framework for Structured Critical Thinking
Have you ever wrestled with a problem in your mind and then, while trying to explain it to someone else, had an epiphany of how to solve it? This has happened to me on numerous occasions. Or have you ever jumped in to develop some code for a piece of business logic that you felt…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 2: Story/Task Decomposition and Estimation as Design
In my first post of this series, I discussed how ambiguity and lack of shared understanding between members of a product development team can occur when we rely on unstructured, ad hoc, and abstract communication processes (i.e., conversations and high-level user stories) for expressing our thoughts and ideas. We feel like we are painting a…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 1
I was recently re-introduced to one of my favorite essays, Why We Should Build Software Like We Build Houses, by Leslie Lamport. Leslie is one of several thought leaders within our industry who I really admire, both for his insights into the nature of software design as well as for his contributions in terms of…
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