Category: Software Engineering
Broadening My Horizons (or How I Moved Outside the Silo and Learned a New Development Methodology)
I’ve been writing software professionally for ten years. Primarily I’ve worked on the web, but I’ve written everything from line-of-business apps to SQL business reports to CMS-based websites. I’ve always worked in small shops with one to three developers. We’ve always been fairly siloed; each of us writing our own software that we were individually…
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TeamCity Builds with the Visual Studio 2012 Test Runner
Since we use private GitHub repositories for our code, we needed something to easily manage our builds. When we had a new project recently start up, we decided it was time to take the plunge with TeamCity. However, we found a problem with this: we use fakes for unit testing, something that requires the Visual…
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500,000 Reps and Counting
In March, the EliteForm team celebrated a major milestone: 500,000 reps tracked by our PowerTracker system. If you’re not familiar with EliteForm, it’s a company we launched in 2012 that provides coaches a way to create workout designs in a web-based application (StrengthPlanner) and publish them to touchscreen based units mounted on weight racks (PowerTracker)….
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JSON and .NET Decimals
I recently had a problem with my controller inconsistently picking up a decimal value in my model. Here’s what the Action looked like: [HttpPost] public ActionResult SaveItem(Item myItem) {…} For simplicity we’ll say this is what Item looked like: [DataContract] public class Item { [DataMember] public long Id { get; set; } [DataMember] public decimal…
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Debugging on the Web
When we develop for Windows, we use a debugger. So why does so much of our web development follow the code refresh ”Did it work?” progression? All modern web browsers have some sort of web development tools. These can be used to check your CSS, manually manipulate Document Object Model (DOM) elements, and even debug…
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Our Experience with Telerik Reporting
The Beehive team recently had the opportunity to improve the quality of its reporting. We came to the conclusion that our current implementation too slow, difficult to keep configured, and too difficult to maintain. Our original implementation used SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), which is a server-based solution from Microsoft. This choice made sense in…
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Exceptions: Exceptionally Slow
For almost everything you do, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat crack an egg, and coding is no exception. Ask 1000 programmers to write the same program and they will write it 1000 different ways. Sometimes this can get you in trouble and oftentimes experienced coders will see pitfalls before they…
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Observations from the Backlog Management Team (aka Spencer Farley)
As the summer began to wind down, we asked that each intern team write about what they worked on, what they learned, and how this experience will affect the remainder of their formal education. In this post, Spencer Farley talks about how he – as a one-man team – spent the summer developing a backlog…
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Our Goals
When our summer interns started, I sat down with them to cover the nitty gritty details of what, why and how we do things at Don’t Panic Labs. I broke it down into three categories: our goals, what we value and what we expect. In what I envision as a series of posts, I’ll lay…
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Observations from the Beehive Mobile Intern Team
At the end of the summer, we asked each intern team write to about what they worked on, what they learned, and how this experience will affect the remainder of their formal education. This post is from the Mobile Beehive team embedded with Beehive Industries. Mobile Beehive team members are Avery Quandt and Tim Hoffman….
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