Category: Software Engineering
Spooky Tales from the Dev Side
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…
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Working for Steaks
Ribeye steaks are one of my favorite things. Not sirloins, not New York strips, but ribeyes. I love a good fatty steak cooked with salt, pepper, and compound butter. Very tasty. So, of course, I was happy when we got to work with the Nebraska Cattlemen Association. The application we built with Cattlemen provides a…
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Quick Thoughts on My Time at the IDesign Architecture Clinic
Doug Durham, Andy Unterseher, and I recently returned from an IDesign Architecture Clinic held in Kansas City. This week-long class was taught by Michael “Monty” Montgomery, who has a very engaged and driven approach to education. He provided a lot of real-world / from the trenches feedback that I certainly appreciate. We started the week…
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Hello .NET Core 3.0
.NET Core 3.0 shipped a couple of weeks ago, and it seems that Microsoft continues to improve this often-used technology and the lives of developers. We here at Don’t Panic Labs have been using a flavor of .NET Core 2.x on most of our projects for the last year or so. Seeing the continued improvement…
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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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UI Kills the Developer — Things That Need to Change in Software Development
The thing that most people think of when they think of a software program is the UI (user interface). The UI is how users interact with software and it’s how they identify with (or fight against) the system. But, the process of building user interfaces hasn’t really seen the improvements you would expect given the…
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Thinking Hurts — Things That Need to Change in Software Development
It is easy to convince people to eat sugar, it tastes good. I think it is also easy to convince people not to think, especially in the context of software development projects. Decide what you want to build and just go go go! In my post “Things Need to Change in the Software Development World”,…
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10 Rules for Providing a Good User Experience
I am not a designer, I don’t play one on TV, and I didn’t stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night. But over the years, I have developed some thoughts around UI / UX that have resulted in some basic “rules” to apply when building systems. While this set of rules is far from…
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Things Need to Change in the Software Development World
Warning: Minor rant below. I can’t say how my mind got on this topic, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about our industry’s approach to software development. In many ways, software development is getting better. It’s ahead of where we were when I started as a professional developer over 20 years ago. But while…
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Working for Beer
Beer, Beets, Battlestar Galactica. Oh my! I feel it is safe to assume that beer is pretty popular here in the good old USA. Thirty years ago, everyone was drinking their favorite big brand: Bud Light, Miller Light, or — my personal favorite of the classic big beers — Coors Light. Now the world has…
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