Category: Software Engineering

Anyone who does consulting is keenly aware of the importance of time tracking. Harvest is an excellent tool for logging time for projects. It’s the system we use here at Don’t Panic Labs, and we’ve found it to be both low friction and highly valuable. But there may be times when you want to use…

There is something really appealing about native applications. As a user, having a “real” application – as opposed to a web application – often feels better. Native applications feel like a real piece of productive software. Maybe that’s why I enjoy working on them. I know that my work will produce something I might enjoy…

GitHub is the standard for online source control. It was really the first platform many of us knew about for the hosting of git in the cloud, and we have all used it at some point. At Don’t Panic Labs, we have been using Azure Dev Ops more than GitHub during the last few years….

Hosting your backend solution used to be pretty straightforward for .NET developers. You were basically writing an ASP.NET website that was hosted in IIS. Today there are a lot of options, of which IIS is still one of them. Many of the web applications we write today end up hosted in either Azure App Services…

Sending emails is a common feature in software these days. A user signs up, we send an email. A user places an order, we send an email. This sort of action happens all over. So it isn’t surprising that as software developers, it’s pretty common for us to include email functionality in the systems we…

Code reviews are one of the best things you can use as a proxy for how things are going on a project. Just the lack of code reviews is very telling. But how long it takes to do code reviews can also be telling, as can the size of code reviews. If you have to…

AWS has a lot of great services, but one of the most useful is also one of the least sexy: a basic user management service called Cognito. Cognito provides authentication for users in the cloud. For those of us used to the Azure world, think Azure B2C but with a less awkward configuration. I actually…

AWS Lambdas are, from a technology perspective, a lot like Azure Functions. They provide a simple and cost-effective way to host code in the cloud, and they can respond to a variety of events such as HTTP requests or queue triggers. Azure DevOps is a platform for hosting projects in the cloud, including task management,…