Category: Software Engineering
Falling Short on Training Software Developers
I worry daily about the software we rely on in our daily lives. One need only look at the problems our airlines have had and the disruptions they have caused in our lives. I feel like there is significant risk that we will be crushed under the weight of technical debt in this software. As…
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Tools are Just Part of the Story
We consider ourselves a .NET shop. Our tools are usually Visual Studio, C#, MSSQL Server, IIS/Azure, ASP.NET MVC, EntityFramework, etc. We have an incredible amount of institutional knowledge of these technologies. We’ve found the pain points. We’ve developed work arounds. We have best-practices. We have thousands of lines of code to use as examples. We…
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A Look Back at ng-conf 2017
It is hard to believe that it was already two weeks ago that Andrew Tarr and I were in Salt Lake City attending ng-conf 2017. I have to say that it was a great conference and I learned even more than I had anticipated in the three days we were there. The format of the…
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Automated UI Testing Using TestStack.White and Continuous Integration with TeamCity
One of the things that our development approach at DPL allows us to do is to have a very low ratio of QA testers per software engineer. Our architecture designs and patterns provide for very isolatable and testable components, allowing us to reach high coverage numbers in most areas of our code. However, one area…
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Two Months of Mobile UX: Just Don’t
I’ve been on the road for about a month and a half now traveling Europe. My 15-inch MacBook is many things, but light is not one of them. It remained at home and I’m on the road with an Android phone and an older model iPad. Traveling this way has helped me see with maddening…
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Funability
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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Things You Do Not Know You Do Not Know
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
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
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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The Day Microsoft Told Me “We should see other people”
In my July blog post (Why I’m Betting on Windows Phone), I shared my history as a Windows Phone user and continued confidence in its future. As a user of their phone/mobile OS for around 10 years, I was dumbstruck by the new Lumia phones: they’re not available or compatible with Verizon. The news was…
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