Category: Leadership
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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Challenges Women in STEM are Facing Today
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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Getting to the Core
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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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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Visual Studio Live – Orlando
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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Perfect is the Enemy of Good
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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Things You Will Probably Learn in the First Year of Being a Developer
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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FU It
The future isn’t certain, but my decisions today will impact tomorrow. We had agency in the past, we have agency in the present, and that agency will impact our future. Sometimes we joke that a particular problem is for “Future Us”. Sometimes we shorten it to “FU It”, Future Us it. This is a silly…
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Reconnecting at HDC 2021
Last week was AIM’s Heartland Developers Conference (HDC) in Omaha. Spread out over three days, this annual event was held at the CHI Health Center arena (a change of scenery from the past several years). Each day was geared toward a different experience level: Novice, Pro, and Expert. This year’s event allowed me to do…
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