Category: Software Engineering

Amazon Web Services (AWS) makes many common cloud services easy to create and maintain. One of the many AWS services really makes easy is supporting authentication. One of them, Cognito, is a platform for authentication within the cloud. Let’s walk through how to use Cognito along with AWS’s Amplify service to create an Angular application…

Web development often involves a few components. First is developing the markup (HTML) that runs in a web browser. Second is developing the application style, which is often done using CSS. Third is some client-side application logic, possibly written in JavaScript. Fourth is a backend running on a server somewhere. One interesting aspect of web…

Continuous Integration (CI) is a strange concept from the perspective of an outsider. Some of our topics in software development make sense from the outside. Unit tests imply we are adding some value to our development process. Requirement gathering makes sense to almost anyone. But the concept of Continuous Integration seems a little bit like…

Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) are kind of the new hotness right now. Lots of chatter, but most probably can’t even spell PWA. 😉 PWAs are an attempt to create applications that live in the web browser and behave like real applications. Let’s take our Angular HTTP Call example and make it into a PWA. To…

These days, Async / Await is old hat for most C# developers. Using it in C# land makes async programming almost as readable as synchronous code. What is the difference between synchronous and asynchronous code? Quite frankly, you can read synchronous code and asynchronous code, but it is kind of a mess. With asynchronous code,…

As we near the end of another year, it’s time to look back at what our team has contributed to the Don’t Panic Labs blog. Usually, we just cover what was published on our blog, but 2018 saw the launch of Doug Durham’s own site and blog. In late September, he began a three-part series…

Dependency inversion is a common software engineering concept. It is the D in SOLID. With DI we are intentionally not programming against a particular implementation. Often this manifests itself by passing the implementation into a service through its constructor. This is called constructor injection. Angular uses constructor injection within its architecture. Services are injected into…

Fingers on the keyboard is the fastest way to get a project off track. When writing software, jumping straight into code is almost always the wrong decision. Sometimes we architect-types think we need to start whiteboarding solutions. Starting there is also the wrong decision. What’s more important than either of those is requirements? We have…

Unit testing is a valuable part of any development process. It isn’t as useful as many developers make it out to be; there are many things developers should be focused on more than unit tests. Code review is one such thing. But just because it isn’t the most important thing, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be…