Category: Development Methodologies & Best Practices
CodeBreak: AI-Assisted Development – Part 1
AI (Large Language Models, or LLMs) can be helpful in generating code quickly. The problem is that they often don’t generate useful code. To be honest, they often generate erroneous and potentially insecure code. In this blog post, I will show a potential template to use when prompting LLMs that will help get you closer…
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Get an Overview
After we have a rough mental model of a software system, we often want to get an overview of the system. In this step, we are trying to peel back one more layer. Where a mental model is a rough understanding of the system, an overview is deeper and more complete. We often jump straight…
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Making a Mental Model
What does a year look like? This is a question you may have been asked before. And there is a variety of works out there discussing the differences in how people perceive a year. Ultimately, many people have some sort of circle for a year. When creating a software system, we should create a mental…
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Question Mark
Questions are an essential part of any development process. Developing software is a continual process. We are always writing the next piece of software. New tasks are kind of like the mail for mailmen, the mail just keeps coming. The tasks just keep coming. It is very easy to get heads down and stop asking…
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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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Protecting Master Branches with Policies in Visual Studio Online
At Don’t Panic Labs, we love tools that help us ensure we are writing quality code and following our development patterns and practices. We are using Visual Studio Online for many of our current projects and we have found some very useful features for protecting the master branches. Requiring pull requests for a branch On…
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Funability, Part 5: A Layered Approach to Quality
Note: This post was co-authored by Chad Michel. The rest of this 5-part series can be found here: Part 1 – What and Why Part 2 – Leverage Your Leadership Roles Part 3 – Maximizing Productivity Part 4 – Processes Can Be Fun We’ve now come to the last post in our series on…
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Funability, Part 4: Processes Can Be Fun
Note: This post was co-authored by Chad Michel. The rest of this 5-part series can be found here: Part 1 – What and Why Part 2 – Leverage Your Leadership Roles Part 3 – Maximizing Productivity Part 5 – A Layered Approach To Quality In the fourth part of our series, we will be building…
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SQL Aliasing – Why You Need It
Quick word on Aliasing. In the past few months I have come across a SQL issue that occurs in many different configurations, across various physical locations, and amongst several engineers. Since it was so prevalent I thought it might be helpful to talk about aliasing SQL instances. When you install a SQL instance, no matter…
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Funability, Part 3 – Maximizing Productivity
Note: This post was co-authored by Chad Michel. The rest of this 5-part series can be found here: Part 1 – What and Why Part 2 – Leverage Your Leadership Roles Part 4 – Processes Can Be Fun Part 5 – A Layered Approach To Quality In this third part of our series, we are…
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