The Odd-yssey: My Epic Journey Chasing Down Webpage Performance Issues
No debugging adventure is boring. As a case in point, I was recently trying to nail down the cause of some weird behavior experienced by a specific customer with a specific setup on a specific mobile device running EliteForm’s Paperless application. The majority of the work on Paperless was completed by our student-lead Design Studio…
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You Can Support Teaching Kids to Code
We put a lot of time and effort into teaching 3rd-5th graders in Lincoln how to code through Community Learning Centers (CLC). They’re using Scratch, ROBOTS, and being extra creative while learning teamwork and problem-solving skills. We want to expand this program to even more schools, but we need your help. Give to Lincoln Day…
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Learning to Code
A lot of people have been asking recently, “How do I get into coding?” We happen to really, really love coding and are happy to share what we know. We realize that everyone’s journey is different and emphasize that there certainly is no silver bullet that guarantees success. With that in mind, we assembled some…
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We Love When People Learn to Code
We love when people learn to code and we love teaching folks to code. It’s a great investment in ourselves and our community. Omaha Code School has been in the news lately. They have quite the space. But, like true hipsters, we thought of this first. 🙂 Here are some fun facts about Lincoln Code…
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Scoping Selectors in CSS and jQuery: Working Small to Big
SS and jQuery selectors can be very powerful, but with great power comes great chances to mess things up (yes, you can quote that). One such problem I’ve seen is applying these selectors at a much higher level than is needed. This may work for some cases, but will probably end up causing headaches and…
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Exceptions: Exceptionally Slow
For almost everything you do, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat crack an egg, and coding is no exception. Ask 1000 programmers to write the same program and they will write it 1000 different ways. Sometimes this can get you in trouble and oftentimes experienced coders will see pitfalls before they…
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Using Lucene.NET for Searching PDFs
Note: This post was co-authored by Emily Douglas. For one of our recent projects, we developed a public-facing website that needed the ability to search through a large number of archived PDFs. This may sound trivial, but we had some unique needs and situations we had to work around (isn’t that always how it is):…
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Deploying Console Apps via MSBuild
VS2010 and MSBuild don’t provide a good way to deploy windows apps using continuous integration (especially to different environments). Over the past couple days I’ve wasted a lot of time manually deploying my apps to test them on dev. Brian Gansemer has talked about creating hooks for deploying ClickOnce apps as part of the build…
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Load Testing in Visual Studio 2010
Have you ever wondered if your custom data access code is any more efficient than simply loading a DataTable? Not that I’d recommend using DataTables except for certain situations, but Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate makes it easy to load test your data access classes to determine performance. In order to test this out I created…
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Book Review: Code by Charles Petzold
This summer we hosted 23 interns at the Don’t Panic Labs office. These interns were placed into four separate teams, with each team tasked to develop a product based around a specific need. Spencer Farley, who was a member of the Carnac team and is now a member of the Don’t Panic Labs team, shares…
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