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:More...

Neema Bahramzad is a senior Computer Engineering major at the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and was one of our 2012 summer interns. He is also co-founder, along with Caitlin Bales, of Locabal – of a new company whose mission is to connect producers of handcrafted items with buyers locally and globally. Here he shares his experience with Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk solution.More...

As the summer began to wind down, we asked that each intern team write about what they worked on, what they learned, and how this experience will affect the remainder of their formal education. In this post, Spencer Farley talks about how he – as a one-man team – spent the summer developing a backlog management application for internal use. More...

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 out what I covered with them because I don't think these, at a high level, are unique to just our intern experience. More...

At the end of the summer, we asked each intern team write to about what they worked on, what they learned, and how this experience will affect the remainder of their formal education. This post is from the Mobile Beehive team embedded with Beehive Industries. Mobile Beehive team members are Avery Quandt and Tim Hoffman. More...

As the summer begins to wind down for our intern teams, we asked that each one write about what their team worked on, what they learned, and how this experience will affect the remainder of their formal education. This post is from the Coach Tablet team embedded with EliteForm. Team members are Jed Dumire, Dalton Dick and Nate Watley. More...

As the summer begins to wind down for our intern teams, we asked that each one write about what their team worked on, what they learned, and how this experience will affect the remainder of their formal education. This post is from the Strength as a Service (SaaS) team embedded with EliteForm. SaaS team members are Andrew Koerner, Caitlyn Bales and Neema Bahramzad. More...

People will sometimes ask us how we get value from our daily standups. This got us thinking about why we do standups in the first place, what we want to get out of the standups, and why we think our standups work. More...

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 had to make sure that any affected aspects of the build process were also changed. We talked about how we might be able to transition that role to someone else, like a new hire. She mentioned that it should now be more manageable because the job was more about maintenance than development. More...

"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 always felt the type of problem being solved and the personnel involved should dictate the method. Planning, constraints, and preliminary design should be tailored to the level of complexity and uncertainty of the problem, as well as the composition and maturity of the team involved. More...