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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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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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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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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Earlier this month, I attended the Nebraska Women in STEM conference in Omaha, and it was my first time experiencing it. I wanted to share a few thoughts with others regarding the conference. First, seeing so many women in one place was powerful; the second observation I had was that whether it was intentional or…
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During a recent 1-on-1, I was asked about how I developed my ability to summarize thoughts succinctly and how that person could develop that skill as well. The question candidly caught me a little off guard. The question came from a recent meeting where a partner had spent a solid 5-10 minutes outlining the challenges…
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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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Some of our Don’t Panic Labs team attended Live 360 (which included Visual Studio Live) in Orlando last week. I’ve never had the opportunity to participate in a Visual Studio Live conference before, so I was pretty excited to check it out. While we were there to exhibit Tenzing, our new business alignment platform, I…
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So you want everything to work out just right; get and keep everything in a perfect and clean state. I think many of us engineering types want everything neat and 100% predictable. I know I tend to be this way. But often, this tendency works against us. Pushing for perfect, or the complete handling of…
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You will learn a lot during your first year as a software developer. But the biggest surprise may be how vital communication is to the success of software projects. Many of the things learned during the first year boil down to communication. Project management, task management, standups, iteration planning, and retros are all really about…
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