Category: View From The Booth
Making Sense of Blockchain
If you’re like me, you are probably trying to make some sense of the hype (and hysteria?) around blockchain. While the concept of blockchain is fairly approachable, the applications of this technology (beyond the obvious financial transaction ledgers) is not. I have spent some time and thought trying to identify some analogies from our past…
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The Importance of Context in Engineering
People who know me understand how strongly I feel about experiential learning. I have often talked about how valuable I believe my own personal experiences are and how I feel they impact the way I see and approach problems. I even wrote a blog post talking about how challenging it can be to work with…
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Looking Back and Looking Ahead
As we were looking back over the blog’s 2012 stats, I was struck (and humbled, honestly) at how many visitors we’ve received and the attention certain posts had garnered. Our five most popular posts in 2012 were: Ganz’s ClickOnce Publish and Deploy from Team Foundation Server 2010 Santi’s Developing Reports for SQL Server Reporting Services…
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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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The Upside of Being Thrown Into the Fire
During a recent one-on-one session, I had a discussion with one of our engineers about her role as “build master” for one of our companies. In this role, she was responsible for building the initial project architecture, and setting up and managing most of the TFS build definitions. But as various project components changed, she…
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The Voodoo We Do
“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Albert Einstein In the world of software development, there are always religious arguments being made as to which method is best. Most people agree that Agile-based methods are the most appropriate for software development, but we stop short of saying this is always true. I have…
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Of Internships and New Grads
Internships are new to us. In fact, hiring people straight out of college is new to us. Historically, we have built our teams by hiring experienced (or relatively experienced) people often via word of mouth recommendations. We have always been quite protective of our culture and the impact of bringing new people into our organizations….
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Look Before You Leap
At Don’t Panic Labs, we strive to instill individuals with the mindset of “think like an engineer”. By this, we mean that developers should be thinking more than just how to write good code; they should be considering as many aspects as possible regarding their project. This could involve learning more about how their application…
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What I Would Tell My 15-Year-Old Self
I attended the first day of Big Omaha yesterday and was really impressed with the conference. It was my first time there and I plan to be a regular attendee. At the end of the day there was a general Q&A with all of the day’s speakers. One of the questions asked was “If you…
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View From The Booth
I’ve created a new category of blog posts called “View From The Booth” where I will share my observations and thoughts that result from experiences working with students and new hires. Much like a coach watching football practice from the top of the stadium, I see quite a bit in my role at Nebraska Global…
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