Category: Software Engineering

Rarely do legacy systems have any sort of automated testing in place. Usually, all testing has been completed manually on the project. And when this is the case there often isn’t an obvious spot in the solution to add a unit test. Adding tests to an existing project can be extremely painful. There is a…

2019 was another fun and productive year here at Don’t Panic Labs. As I look back, I’m a bit surprised by how many projects we completed and the number of clients we were able to help by creating value for their businesses. Here are what I see as highlights of 2019. (More) to the Cloud…

Working in a legacy system runs the gamut of difficulty: it can be easy, sometimes challenging, and other times almost impossible. It is hard to know which of these experiences you will face until you get in there and do a little work. If you already have a good understanding of the legacy system you’re…

“If you don’t know where you are going you might end up somewhere else.” – Yogi Berra One of the critical challenges with legacy systems is not having a clear goal in mind. Knowing where you want to end up is essential for a few reasons. First, it provides you and your team with a…

As you approach a legacy system, there are many things (plays) you might do to get a handle on it. We covered this list on a general level in my first post in this series. In this post, we are going to cover maybe the most important play: the system review. What Process Is the…

There are a lot of working solutions out there. And there’s a lot of code behind those solutions. Along with those solutions are often many reasons why they need to be upgraded (and not just enhanced with new features). Sometimes the weight of technical debt becomes too large. Sometimes technology changes out from under a…

Apple continually updates its products and technologies. While that’s usually a thing to relish, it sometimes comes at a cost. One such recent change is the UIWebView component. Apple has warned developers that UIWebView is deprecated, and at some point, they will stop allowing app store submissions for applications that use it. If you need…

Software development can be a pretty scary business. Things randomly break, and you sometimes don’t even know why. Since Halloween is this week, let’s look at some examples from people here at Don’t Panic Labs. When Optimizations Don’t The first is something many of us have experienced: everything in production works fine…until it doesn’t. In…