Blog & Newsroom

We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.

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General Info | 4 min read

It’s Not About Faster, It’s About Better

I’ve had a hypothesis I’ve been turning in my head for a while. The current version goes something like this: By default, AI tools increase speed and throughput but damage software quality. The marketing for the tools boasts about speed and throughput if you just use them everywhere…and that leads to them being used everywhere, […]

AI & Data | 10 min read

We Turned an Awards Ceremony into a Live Arcade With AI

How SEP used Generative AI to help NCWIT Awards participants build and deploy Three.js games

robot arm reaching into traditional toolbox
AI & Data | 9 min read

We’re Picking Tools for a Different Developer Now

A colleague of mine, Joe Coy, recently told me something that stuck with me. His team had chosen Maestro over Appium for mobile UI testing. The team’s reasoning made a lot of sense: Maestro was lightweight and easier to set up. By every traditional measure, it was the right call. Then they started using an […]

close up of a professional selecting from a screen of options to hire someone
Practices | 9 min read

How to Hire a Custom Software Development Firm (No Technical Background Required)

A Note From the Author: As SEP’s Director of Marketing, I conduct all of our mid- and post-project client interviews. The same theme comes up again and again from people who went through this process for the first time: they had no idea what to look for, and no one made it easy to figure […]

General Info | 39 min read

Sleep On It: The Engineering Case for Better Rest

A few months ago I read a book called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist who runs the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley and has published over a hundred peer-reviewed papers on sleep. I love reading about health and wellness, and the more I got into this one the more […]

2026 SEP Foundation Scholarship recipients
SEP News | 2 min read

SEP Foundation Awards 2026 Scholarships to Two Indiana Students

For the first time, the SEP Foundation Maker Scholarship names dual recipients Westfield, Indiana – The SEP Foundation is excited to announce the 2026 recipients of the SEP Foundation Maker Scholarship: José G., a computer science student at Purdue University Fort Wayne, and Ani A., who is studying computer engineering at Purdue University. This marks […]

SEP Top Work Places 2026
Culture | 5 min read

SEP Ranks #2 on Indianapolis’ 2026 Top Workplaces List

Westfield, IN – May 7, 2026 – SEP, a software product design and development firm based in Westfield, Indiana, has once again earned a spot among Central Indiana’s Top Workplaces, placing second in the Midsize Companies category. The recognition is based entirely on employee feedback collected through an anonymous survey administered by Energage LLC. Survey […]

small green and yellow bug illustration
AI & Data | 2 min read

Agentic Bug Fixing Experience Report

We recently released our first beta build to our client’s QA. Their Software Development Product Manager knows her failure cases inside out and quickly compiled eight tricky bugs. We wondered how the Agent would handle them. Gotta start somewhere We took her bugs as a list of platforms and what she found. We wrote (I […]

bounded contexts floor plan
AI & Data | 4 min read

Agentic Software Development Requires Good Engineering Practices

I’ve recently started working on a client project that is using Agentic AI to develop a sizable mobile application with a medium sized team. There are a couple of lessons I’m learning about how AI and architecture fit together. We have found the number of lines of code each developer generates is far more than […]

dictionary page open to a definition of AI
AI & Data | 11 min read

24 AI Terms Every Professional Needs to Know in 2026

AI, LLM, Context, Agent, Harness… If you can’t pin down a precise definition for any of those words, keep reading. The workplace has been flooded with new AI terminology. To add confusion, many of the words get used interchangeably. Words are important. It’s how we communicate. It’s how we make sure everyone is on the same page. So let’s start with the […]

AI & Data | 11 min read

The Workflow That Teaches Itself: A Self-Improving Agent Workflow

There’s a wave of writing right now about “harness engineering” — the idea that the infrastructure wrapped around an AI agent matters more than the model underneath it. The data is hard to argue with. Vercel deleted 80% of their agent’s tools and watched accuracy jump from 80% to 100%. OpenAI published a dedicated post […]

visual abstract of a web floating in space
AI & Data | 10 min read

Treat Your AI Workflow Like You Treat Your Code

I kept having the same argument with Claude. Not a dramatic one. More like the low-grade friction of a coworker who keeps formatting the PR description wrong no matter how many times you fix it. The AI would reach for the wrong abstraction. I’d correct it. Next session, same mistake. I’d correct it again. And […]

Have questions? We’re an open book.

Every industry has its jargon and ours is no different! If you’re new to our world, or just want to see if we mean the same thing, check out our glossary. No big deal if you don’t speak the lingo—we’ll meet you where you’re at. But one thing’s for sure, we can’t make something awesome together if we’re talking past each other.

We know our way around the stack.

Different problems call for different tools. We’re not tied to one way of building, which gives us flexibility in how we tackle the work. That range shows up in a tech stack that supports many paths forward.

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Python
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We help you know what to expect.

Our FAQ answers common questions, so there are fewer surprises.

We don’t hide behind jargon.

Words matter when teams are working together. This glossary explains common software terms, so nothing gets lost in translation.

Ask us anything.

Learning is in our DNA, so we’re always happy to talk with you about software, design, and development. Reach out with your questions.