Category: Software Engineering
Quick Look – Angular Routing
One of the great things about Angular is that it provides everything pretty much out of the box. You don’t have to string together a bunch of tools, you can just focus on solving problems. In this blog post, we are going to focus on the Angular Router. Since Angular is a single page application…
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Top 10 Things Overheard in a Development Shop
#10 – “It’s not really the best, but…” This is often heard when developers don’t come up with the best solution and have to compromise to something that isn’t quite wonderful. #9 – “What do the logs say?” When problems occur, the first place to look is usually the logs. This actually might be…
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Mobile Technology Choices – Executive Summary
Delivering applications for mobile devices is essential for many business applications. For much of the business software we write at Don’t Panic Labs, some sort of mobile experience is necessary and can be done in many ways. This post will walk through many of the options available today. There really isn’t an “always do it…
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Top Ten Software Villains
This afternoon, Doug Durham presented the afternoon keynote at the 2018 Heartland Developers Conference. In his presentation, entitled “Be the Hero – Stop Being the Development Villain”, talks about the ways we as developers can sometimes be the villain and contribute to why software often breaks. But there are other villains in this story, ones…
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Notes from the 2018 Summer Interns
Hello! We are the seven 2018 summer interns of Don’t Panic Labs (Matt Kachek, Jack Rowen, Luke Farritor, Lexie Karkazis, Taylor Bernt, Noah Costello, and Lee Hayes). In this blog post, we’ll share about the projects that we worked on (MyLNK, TeamMates, and BenefitEd) as well as share some of the experiences we had outside…
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Design – Executive Summary
The pull to start writing code is strong when building a new system. It feels urgent, but it isn’t the most important thing you should be doing… When people think of software development they often think of a programmer typing 0s and 1s into a green screen all alone in a room drinking Mountain Dew….
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Creating a Barcode Scanner App with Ionic
Scanning a barcode or a QR code is a pretty common business request. Luckily, almost all users walk around with devices capable of scanning barcodes: their phones. In this blog post, we are going to step through creating a mobile scanner application using Ionic, Xcode, and an iPhone. Create a blank app called “IonicCamera”: ionic…
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Automated Testing – Executive Summary
Automated testing is something developers talk a lot about. But what is automated testing, and why is it important? Unit testing usually means testing a piece of software in isolation, away from the rest of the code base. Sometimes this entire topic falls under the broad heading of unit testing. Unit testing typically doesn’t include…
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Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms, Part 1
Dave Kovic is my favorite modern president. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the real president; President Mitchell was the real president. Xamarin allows us to create mobile applications that appear to be fake applications. But unlike Dave, Xamarin apps are real. Xamarin.Forms allows you to write one application that runs on both iOS and Android. The goal…
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Database Change Control – Executive Summary
We have spent a good amount of time discussing database change control. Why? Why should we care? Why not just let people manually deploy things to SQL? The answer is four-fold: Repeatability Trackability Maintainability Ties application code to the database code Repeatability Ideally, we want the ability to quickly rebuild our environments. We want a…
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