Category: Software Engineering
Developing Software Products in a World of Gray
Like it or not, we live and work in a world of uncertainty and vague requirements. I like telling people that very little in my life is black and white. Most of it is shades of gray. This is not necessarily a bad thing because I think it is what makes designing software products (and…
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SQL Server Maintenance for the Full-Stack Engineer
Don’t Panic Labs is an office filled with full-stack developers. We cover all aspects of software — from JavaScript in a browser, to core business rules in C#, to performant queries and table structures in SQL Server. Full-stack developers have a vast knowledge of all technologies required to create a working system, but do not…
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Automating Releases
Engineers want to see their code used. Time spent on a release is time not spent working on other products or new features. Building a system that allows for automating releases can be a great way for dynamic teams to save time and focus on their passions. On the Beehive Industries team (the one on…
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Infotec 2015 Recap
Our team made the drive up to Omaha this week to exhibit and present at Infotec 2015. As we continue to expand, we found this conference to be a great opportunity to make new connections and share some of what we’ve learned while building software companies and products over the past years. We were very…
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Nebraska Code Follow-up
We were overwhelmed by the attendance and response to the presentation we gave at the 2015 Nebraska Code conference on how we approach product development at Nebraska Global / Don’t Panic Labs. It was great to have so many people interested in what we do and how we do it. Afterwards, we were asked by…
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Thoughts on ‘Generation STEM’ from the Girl Scout Research Institute
The STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields are important. One of the saddest realities of our field is the huge drop in the percentage of women in computer science over the past few decades. The Girl Scouts Research Institute took a good look at why that’s happening and how to change it. (PDF) After surveying…
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The Odd-yssey: My Epic Journey Chasing Down Webpage Performance Issues
No debugging adventure is boring. As a case in point, I was recently trying to nail down the cause of some weird behavior experienced by a specific customer with a specific setup on a specific mobile device running EliteForm’s Paperless application. The majority of the work on Paperless was completed by our student-lead Design Studio…
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Speed Comparison: Dapper vs Entity Framework
A few months ago I ran across a blog post about getting started with Dapper.NET. I had heard of Dapper before but had never actually tried to use it. Dapper is known for being fast, but I was curious just how much faster it would be in the situations I typically find myself: writing database…
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Deploying Reports for SQL Server Reporting Services
This is the long-overdue follow up to our Developing Reports for SQL Server Reporting Services post. Today I’m going to cover how to deploy your reports to an instance of SSRS. Assumptions Here are some things to keep in mind before deploying your SSRS reports: The Reporting Services feature must be installed and set up…
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Sticky Sessions for Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancers
One of the great features of Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) – at least in my opinion – is the ability to establish sticky sessions (or session affinity). These allow clients to connect to specific instances in the load-balancer for the life of a session. In typical situations (when you don’t use sticky sessions), calls…
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