Our 10 Most Popular Blog Posts of 2015
As another year winds down, it’s only natural to look back at what we’ve accomplished. Just one part of what we do is share on our blog what we have learned and experienced. Since we’re not interested in keeping all of that just for ourselves, we hope the blog is a way we can help…
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Stressing Continuous Integration
After being a part of the start of numerous projects for Don’t Panic Labs, I have become rather familiar with our term “Iteration 0” (Iteration Zero). We have embraced this idea and introduced it into numerous projects – whether they be internal projects or joint ventures. If you have not heard of “Iteration 0”, it…
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How I Approached Unit Testing
A few months back I submitted an idea for a presentation to a developer conference. It was rejected. I’m not alone. We all have, at some point, been turned down. Maybe our ideas were not as jaw-dropping or life-changing but that’s no reason to just let those ideas never see the light of day. We…
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Architect’s Master Class – A Rewarding Experience
When I came to Don’t Panic Labs (and Nebraska Global) in late 2012, I was less than two years out of college in my career as a software engineer. I had heard about not only the exciting projects that were taking place at Don’t Panic Labs, but also the great processes and structure around these…
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Backlog Visualizations: Tables Are Your Friend
Agile backlogs have become the standard tool used by software teams to document, prioritize, and discuss functionality requests. Although agile backlogs are simple to use and easy to implement, they suffer from the same problem as all lists—growing to a point where they become unmanageable. Although Agile methodologies suggest a number of practices to help…
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Product Development at Nebraska Global / Don’t Panic Labs
Last Thursday we hosted an open house as part of Agile Lincoln’s monthly meetup. We were blown away by how many people showed up to see who we are, learn what we’re doing, and hear me talk about our approaches to software engineering. Since then a number of people have requested the slides and recording of…
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Automating Releases
Engineers want to see their code used. Time spent on a release is time not spent working on other products or new features. Building a system that allows for automating releases can be a great way for dynamic teams to save time and focus on their passions. On the Beehive Industries team (the one on…
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Broadening My Horizons (or How I Moved Outside the Silo and Learned a New Development Methodology)
I’ve been writing software professionally for ten years. Primarily I’ve worked on the web, but I’ve written everything from line-of-business apps to SQL business reports to CMS-based websites. I’ve always worked in small shops with one to three developers. We’ve always been fairly siloed; each of us writing our own software that we were individually…
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HTML5 Video: Lessons Learned
We recently completed a web project for a client where videos were an integral part of the site. When the client came to us, they had already vetted their design ideas and had an outside firm create a final site design. Nearly every page of the site was to have a video on it that…
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Standup? What’s a Standup?
People will sometimes ask us how we get value from our daily standups. This got us thinking about why we do standups in the first place, what we want to get out of the standups, and why we think our standups work. For those not familiar with standups, they are brief meetings (usually about 10…
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