Category: Leadership
More Engineers, Please — Things That Need to Change in Software Development
Hiring software developers is hard work; any employer looking to fill developer roles will tell you that. This is made more difficult by the number of employers looking to onboard new hires while, at the same time, there are few developers looking for a job. Finding a good developer is tough. And making the problem…
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Helping Grow The Development Tree
As I move on from Don’t Panic Labs, I thought it would be a great time to reflect on the last 6 ½ years. I realized that I haven’t really done any retrospections or reflecting as I have always been looking toward the future, and I think I may have missed out on a few…
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Design and Development Clinic Review – April 2019
Doug Durham and I recently completed another Software Design and Development Clinic. This week-long set of classes is designed to help level up software developers into senior developers. For us leading the classes, the week is always exhausting but they’re still one of my favorite weeks of the year. Leading even a small group of…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 3: Framework for Structured Critical Thinking
Have you ever wrestled with a problem in your mind and then, while trying to explain it to someone else, had an epiphany of how to solve it? This has happened to me on numerous occasions. Or have you ever jumped in to develop some code for a piece of business logic that you felt…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 2: Story/Task Decomposition and Estimation as Design
In my first post of this series, I discussed how ambiguity and lack of shared understanding between members of a product development team can occur when we rely on unstructured, ad hoc, and abstract communication processes (i.e., conversations and high-level user stories) for expressing our thoughts and ideas. We feel like we are painting a…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 1
I was recently re-introduced to one of my favorite essays, Why We Should Build Software Like We Build Houses, by Leslie Lamport. Leslie is one of several thought leaders within our industry who I really admire, both for his insights into the nature of software design as well as for his contributions in terms of…
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Beer && Code: One of Our Favorite Local Meetups
One of the great things about Lincoln is its growing number of educational opportunities centered around technology and software development. One of them is near and dear to our hearts: Beer && Code. Started by Don’t Panic Labs software engineer Branden Barber (aka Beebs around the office), this monthly get-together meets at various locations around…
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On Leaving the Best Job You Ever Had
I don’t like to use the word “quit.” It makes it sound like you’re giving up, that you are leaving things incomplete. I write that because I am leaving Don’t Panic Labs; I’m leaving the best job I’ve ever had. This was the plan all along I suppose. During one of my first staff meetings…
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Our Sources
At Don’t Panic Labs, we have a pretty well thought out philosophy of software development. Philosophy is the combination of two Greek words philo (or “lover”) and sophia (or “wisdom”). So philosophy could be considered “love of wisdom.” Software development is what we do every day. We want to be wise software developers. We didn’t…
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Top 10 Quotes to Use in Meetings
#10 – “You’ll thank me later.” You can never go wrong quoting Monk. #9 – “Plans are worthless, planning is essential.” This famous quote from Dwight Eisenhower is often useful when discussing plans. It gets to the heart that of planning, that the plan isn’t the important outcome, it is the planning. #8…
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