Thoughts from Software Architect Doug Durham
This month, I am stepping away from daily operations as Managing Partner at Don’t Panic Labs. Over the past 15 years at Nebraska Global and Don’t Panic Labs, I have been engaged every day doing challenging work that I love. I focused on building companies, engineering solutions for our partners, and evangelizing for our ecosystem [ ] The post Finding Joy in the Work and in What Comes Next appeared…
April 2025 marks the 15th anniversary of the founding of Don’t Panic Labs. We are a software product development and innovation company in Nebraska that focuses on providing the necessary support, experience, and product development capacity to innovation groups and entrepreneurs to bring their innovative vision to life. In this blog post, I will be [ ] The post Don’t Panic Labs – The First 15…
Musings on Career Development in Software I have spent a fair amount of time over the last 5-10 years thinking about how our industry views and supports professional development. My own journey has given me an opportunity to see and experience what it takes to go from no education (other than a FORTRAN class in [ ] The post The SWEBOK and Its Applications for Software Developers appeared first on…
What skills and knowledge are developers lacking? How do developers view their current skill sets? How do we help developers add to their toolbox of skills? How can we promote better software engineering practices? At a time when qualified development talent is at a premium, any organization with a development team must be asking these [ ] The post A Snapshot of Software Developer Maturity and…
It is a very exciting day for us at Don’t Panic Labs. Today, we are announcing that we have completed the purchase of investment fund Nebraska Global’s interest in the company. I’m not sure how to put this other than saying that this is a big deal. Perhaps it’s as significant as the steps taken [ ] The post Our Next Bold Move appeared first on Doug Durham .
Last week, I had the privilege to give the opening keynote at the 2021 Nebraska.Code() conference. My topic was Musings on Developer Maturity and Growth where I laid out a model for creating developer maturity proto-personas using IEEE’s Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, or SWEBOK for short. I mentioned as I introduced [ ] The post Get to Know SWEBOK appeared first on Doug…
The countless tragic deaths, most recently of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and the recent violence we have seen play out have reinforced the need for our society to participate in some difficult conversations about who we are and who we want to be. As we witness powerful expressions of grief and anger [ ] The post A Time to Listen and Learn: A Message from CEO Doug Durham…
Have you ever been asked a question along the lines of … “Are you an Agile dev shop?” In my experience, this question is asking, “Are you following an Agile methodology?” and not, “Are you agile?” I think the distinction is important. It seems we have come to a point where whether you are following [ ] The post Are You Agile? appeared first on Doug Durham .
I just got back from the International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE) that was held in Montreal, Canada on May 24-26. This was the first time I had attended and presented at a conference that is primarily focused on research (i.e., formal paper submission and acceptance). I was not exactly sure what to expect [ ] The post Reflecting on the Role and Importance of Software…
Have you ever wrestled with a problem in your mind and then, while trying to explain it to someone else, had an epiphany of how to solve it? This has happened to me on numerous occasions. Or have you ever jumped in to develop some code for a piece of business logic that you felt [ ] The post The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 3: A Framework for Structured Critical Thinking appeared first on…