Category: Leadership
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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What Makes a Successful Developer Lead? A Guide for Aspiring and New Team Leads
Becoming a developer lead is an exciting step in your career. It’s a role that blends technical expertise with leadership and mentorship, making you the glue that holds your team together. Whether you’re stepping into this position for the first time or looking to refine your approach, here’s a guide to help you navigate the…
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The 8 Cs of a Software Architect
How do you think about roles and how people fit into roles? This question often arises when evaluating how someone fits into a particular role. No one is perfect or a perfect fit for any role. But the right people will fit most of a given role. It is valuable to have consistent ways to…
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How Readability Reduces Errors in Judgment
No small number of keystrokes have been spent enumerating the whys and hows of writing readable code. Readability improves the developer experience and makes seeing potential issues much easier. We might even say that by writing readable code, we reduce errors in judgment. To illustrate the point, let’s consider the following example of using the…
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The Life of the Product Owner
Life is a funny thing; I fell into a product manager role several years ago and, in the process, inherited the role of product owner (PO). As of late, I have found myself providing guidance on what it means to be a product owner to various organizations of different sizes and products. The common theme…
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Experimentation: In Support of “Be the Change You Seek”
At Don’t Panic Labs, we regularly lean into our four core values: Change has, and always will be, a constant. There is immense power when we can channel that force. To that end, I initiated a “meta experiment” around defining a process to track, check in on, and amplify the effects of improvements at Don’t…
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Have You Ever Jumped Out of a Plane?
In 2016, I was in Colorado attending a wedding. While at the wedding, my wife’s cousin mentioned he planned to go skydiving in the morning and invited any family members who wanted to join him. Without hesitation, I said, “I’m in!” The next morning, I found myself in a car heading to the Mile-Hi skydiving…
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A Model for Team Decision-Making
Every day, we face many different decisions. Some are small, while others have the potential to impact the course of our lives. We strive to make the best decisions we can and in the most efficient ways possible. Much of what I learned in college regarded making decisions as an individual—seeking out information, weighing pros…
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Reflections on Attending the Kansas City Developer Conference (KCDC 2024)
The Kansas City Developer Conference (KCDC) consists of a full day of participatory workshops, two days full of talks, an evening mixer, a whole lot of sponsor booths, some regretful karaoke, great barbeque, great bars, and at least one actual magician. Today, we’re talking about my attendance at the 15th annual KCDC, held June 26th…
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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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