Category: Software Engineering

Text analysis is very important for many businesses and can provide a wealth of useful information. Traditionally, having a system that did this meant developing a text analysis system from scratch. With many services providing text analysis as a service (such as Azure Cognitive Services), having a text analysis system is easier than ever. Text…

Automating the retrieval of content from HTML pages isn’t something that often comes up, but it does happen. Sometimes people even want to screen scrape their own systems as a way of integration (which is not always the best idea). This automated retrieval of web content and processing it for another purpose is often referred…

What am I looking forward to in 2021? The number one for everyone is the hope that COVID-19 comes to an end. I want to get back to working with my coworkers in person. While being virtual has been okay, I don’t think it is nearly as good as being in the same room. But…

Remote education does work We did a lot of teaching in 2020. It wasn’t always pretty, but we improved a lot and I feel pretty good about it.   Remote work can work, but not as well as in-person We made remote work work, but it was at times a struggle. I’m looking forward to…

How many APIs have we had to learn over the years? Learning is a continual part of being a software developer, and learning APIs is a part of that. Usually, learning an API involves jumping into word walls with occasional code snippets in-between. But Twilio decided to try something different. TwilioQuest is part video game,…

At Don’t Panic Labs, I get to see many business deals that come through. Over the years, they seem to have increased in complexity. Probably the most obvious way they have grown is in the number of pieces. It isn’t uncommon for a solution to have many subsystems, be hosted in the cloud, have many…

I haven’t been a fan of Google Firebase for quite some time. We used it for one project here at Don’t Panic Labs, and it was a pain to work with. The pain comes from three main gripes: It didn’t have a great local development story The technologies in Firebase feel somewhat odd to interact…

AWS Lambdas give us quick code running in the cloud, but we don’t have to know how it is hosted. We are purely just writing functions running in the cloud. And with AWS CodeStar, getting a Node.js/Express.js Lambda set up and running has never been easier. This all seems great, but it does come with…

We write a lot of applications that automate backend processes. These are typically applications that can be a little rough in terms of their user experience because they only function for a few (and often more technically savvy) users. These applications are often heavily data-driven, which is why they usually start in Excel before we…

Why I Read This Book I’ve worked in software development professionally for about six years, throughout which much of my time has been spent in front-end web development. In that time, I have written my fair share of CSS and Sass, but I have never felt especially competent while doing so. I can typically style…