Category: Software Engineering
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…
Read more…
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…
Read more…
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…
Read more…
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”,…
Read more…
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…
Read more…
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…
Read more…
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…
Read more…
Book Review: A Whole New Engineer
Engineering is just for geeks with pocket protectors, right? Engineering is all about math, formula, and intensive study of existing builds, right? I have done a good amount of software education over the years. Some as a student, and some as a teacher. The book “A Whole New Engineer” is a refreshing step back from…
Read more…
Executive Summary – Understanding Developers
From the outside, developers are sometimes seen as trolls living under a bridge. Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh. How about this: strange wizards who wield unknowable powers to make things work. Or perhaps this: t-shirt-wearing loners who subsist on junk food and never go outside. Wrong on all accounts. They are actually quite normal…
Read more…
Quick Look – AWS Cloud9
As I wrote in Part 1 of my REST API with AWS series, development coding shouldn’t happen within the browser due to the lack of good practices such as reuse of functions, source control, and continuous integration. But there is a slight caveat to that: AWS Cloud9. With this service, we essentially get a development…
Read more…