Using LocalStack
Local development is always a priority for us at Don’t Panic Labs. We want a great local development experience because it allows each developer to work independently. Part of having a great local development experience means having all the tools you need on your developer machine. If you are running a system that needs access…
Read more…
Azure DevOps Delivery Plans
Designing projects is challenging, which is probably a big reason why some people don’t even try. But just because something is difficult doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing. Sometimes the most valuable things we do are difficult, and often the value in software development is in the difficult parts. Designing projects has a few obvious…
Read more…
Firebase Emulator!
Having the flexibility to do local development is essential for successful projects. While we have successfully completed projects without a good local development story, I feel we often regret it. Without a good local development story, we often have multiple developers sharing cloud resources. When developers share cloud resources we often end with contention over…
Read more…
Quick Look – Azurite
Creating a good local development experience allows for developers to run independently, with no shared resources and few online connections. This way, developers can code while having a minimal impact on other developers. Now sometimes, you can’t get away without requiring developers to use the cloud while developing a system. One thing Azure does well…
Read more…
NDepend: Powerful Static Code Analysis
How do you effectively evaluate a software solution? This is a question commonly heard in software development. It reminds me of a question posed in Caddyshack, “How do you compare yourself to other golfers?”, to which Chevy Chase responds with, “By height.” Analysis of a system usually requires a lot of leg work, poring through…
Read more…
Is Teams Microsoft’s Sleeper Hit?
Microsoft has built a lot of products that many of us use every day: Windows, Office, Visual Studio, Azure, and Xbox. They’ve all been hits, but there’s one product that is quickly building steam and I expect will become their next big success story: Microsoft Teams. A few years ago, it felt like everyone was…
Read more…
Getting Creative with Google’s Game Builder
Google has released a fun and engaging game building environment. Simply called “Game Builder”, this engine is unlikely to produce the next Halo or Call of Duty, but it’s a quick and easy way to create a video game…and that’s pretty awesome for anyone who’s wanted to try out their own game designs. Can’t you…
Read more…
Quick Thoughts on SwiftUI
The interwebs are all ablaze with Apple’s announcement of SwiftUI. I’ve seen multiple articles about what was covered at the WWDC keynote, but the one topic that stood out to me was SwiftUI. With SwiftUI, did Apple just rewrite software development? What is SwiftUI? SwiftUI looks to be an entirely new way to develop user…
Read more…
JetBrains Rider: First Impressions
When all of us think of .NET development, we think Visual Studio. I’ve been a user of Visual Studio (VS) for years, and it is probably my favorite Microsoft product. If you compare VS to almost any other IDE, you will likely be left wanting. I have tried other editors over the years, but nothing…
Read more…
Augmented Reality May Not Be Useful, But U2 Is Changing Concert Experiences With It
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) are in the news quite often. We’re still in the early days of this technology, even five years removed from the initial release of Google Glass. The hardware in our mobile devices and computers are improving more and more each year – lowering the barrier to entry for…
Read more…
