Category: Software Engineering
Harnessing the Hype: A Pragmatic Guide to Using AI in Development
Artificial Intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept; it’s another part of our development toolbox. And like any powerful tool, it can be used to build incredible things with great efficiency, or it can create a mess that is difficult to untangle. The key isn’t just using AI; it’s using it with discipline and intent….
Read more…
Beyond the Booth: How We Talk About Coaching and Growth in Engineering (and Everywhere)
What have your experiences been with conference vendor booths? When I ask myself that question, do you know what happens? My mind goes blank; they all blur together – none of them stand out. Why? (Channeling my 5-year-old daughter) In my opinion, most booths are trying to project out vs finding a way to take…
Read more…
Vectors, Python, AI, and Your Face
Building a Facial Recognition System with Cursor AI At Don’t Panic Labs, I recently embarked on an prototype project to explore the intersection of computer vision, Python, and AI-assisted development. Our goal was to build a light-weight facial recognition system that could identify faces, create a searchable database, and analyze images. All while leveraging Cursor…
Read more…
You Are a Quantitative Analyst (but Likely Not Very Skilled)
The Hidden Economist in Every Engineer Every time you decide whether to refactor code or push a new feature, you’re doing economics.Software developers and tech leaders make cost-benefit decisions daily, often without realizing it. Should we spend an extra week on automated tests or release now and fix bugs later? That’s a cost-benefit analysis. Do…
Read more…
SAS Style Secure Links: Now with more Bit Shifting!
SAS stands for Shared Access Signature. A SAS style link is a URL that contains parameters needed by the API call as well as a signature that verifies the parameters in the link are correct and haven’t been tampered with. These links can be made to expire, and the key used to create the signature…
Read more…
Don’t Panic Labs – The First 15 Years
April 2025 marks the 15th anniversary of the founding of Don’t Panic Labs. We are a software product development and innovation company in Nebraska that focuses on providing the necessary support, experience, and product development capacity to innovation groups and entrepreneurs to bring their innovative vision to life. In this blog post, I will be…
Read more…
Core Use Cases
In this series, we are focusing on creating a software system. This has many steps. We created a mental model. Next, we got an overview of the project. Then, we gathered requirements and built an epic-level backlog. In this step, we are going to take those artifacts and break them down into core use cases…
Read more…
The Struggle with Vue and ASP.NET Core
There is a wonderful template in Visual Studio to create a FullStack application that serves Vue 3 as the frontend and .NET core as the backend. Microsoft even provides a tutorial on it. But as usual, once you want to customize, things get complicated. I’ve spent hours trying to understand why I could not change…
Read more…
The 8 Cs of a Software Architect
How do you think about roles and how people fit into roles? This question often arises when evaluating how someone fits into a particular role. No one is perfect or a perfect fit for any role. But the right people will fit most of a given role. It is valuable to have consistent ways to…
Read more…
Mocking Email Addresses for Testing
Many people I’ve talked to know how to find a dummy credit card number for testing. And if you don’t, here’s a link: https://docs.stripe.com/testing Fewer people that I’ve talked to know where to find dummy email addresses, and this info was more difficult for me to find online. If you’re working in a legacy codebase…
Read more…