Funability

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Our Friday presentation at Nebraska.Code() was a lot of fun for both Chad and I. We are very passionate about providing environments for software engineers that are more than just fun places to be, but that also make the work itself fun and rewarding. Having a limited amount of time to speak about a topic…

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Wintergaten - Marble Machine

Things You Do Not Know You Do Not Know

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You may have seen this video of the marble music machine and thought, “Wow, that’s pretty cool.” I sure did. As a maker, I was probably more impressed because I recognized the complexities involved and imagined many of the issues he overcame to make it work. Or so I thought. When he published more videos…

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Internal Tools Are The Worst

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One of the first pieces of career advice I received when looking for an internship in software development was to never, ever take an internship where the project is for internal use only. The conventional wisdom on this is so strong that companies often tout the lack of internal projects as a highlight of their…

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Our 10 Most Popular Blog Posts of 2015

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As another year winds down, it’s only natural to look back at what we’ve accomplished. Just one part of what we do is share on our blog what we have learned and experienced. Since we’re not interested in keeping all of that just for ourselves, we hope the blog is a way we can help…

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Authenticating With A Custom Claims-Based Identity

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In one of our recent projects, we were managing data back and forth between two websites: one set up for an intranet with Active Directory authentication and the other set up to face external traffic with Identity authentication. In the project, a need arose to authenticate a user from the Active Directory intranet site on…

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Product Development at Nebraska Global / Don’t Panic Labs

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Last Thursday we hosted an open house as part of Agile Lincoln’s monthly meetup. We were blown away by how many people showed up to see who we are, learn what we’re doing, and hear me talk about our approaches to software engineering. Since then a number of people have requested the slides and recording of…

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GitHub Electron Tutorial: Using Electron-Boilerplate

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GitHub’s Electron framework allows you to leverage the best of web technologies in a cross-platform desktop application. This tutorial shows you how to build your first Electron app using szwacz/electron-boilerplate. A few prerequisites: Git (I use the Git Shell packaged with GitHub for Windows) Node.js NSIS, if you are on Windows and want to build…

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2015 Summer Interns: Learning Through Experience

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Doug’s post from a couple weeks ago reminded me of one of the most interesting philosophies that I have seen to fruition during my time at Don’t Panic Labs. While we are always interested in engineers with a considerable amount of experience, we especially look for bright, young engineers that, regardless of inexperience, exhibit an…

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The Importance of Context in Engineering

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People who know me understand how strongly I feel about experiential learning. I have often talked about how valuable I believe my own personal experiences are and how I feel they impact the way I see and approach problems. I even wrote a blog post talking about how challenging it can be to work with…

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Ensuring Software Quality with a Layered Approach

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The Beehive team (on which I work), as well as all the Nebraska Global companies, have made layered processes and techniques part of our day-to-day operations to ensure the quality of the software we are creating. It is very easy to make a statement like “by relying on more than one testing technique, we will…

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