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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Cucumber Isn’t Human Readable
It’s frequently touted that Cucumber is “human readable” which at first glance seems to be the case. Examples show clean, easy to read language, that then gets a dozen or so lines of scripting to turn into a real test. Some guides will give warnings about some common code smells from poorly written tests, but […]
3 Things Our 2026 Interns Learned About Trust and Bad Questions
Another summer at SEP is wrapping up, which means another round of interns has spent the last few months writing real code, asking real questions, and getting a real look at what it’s like to build software that matters. We asked our 2026 interns to look back on their summer. Left to right: Evan Dossett, […]
Building an AI Dungeon Master With Real Memory
This post walks through three techniques I used to give an AI Dungeon Master real memory: tiered storage across a NoSQL event log, a vector database, and a knowledge graph; narrative hierarchies that break story goals into smaller pieces; and proactive retrieval that pulls in the right context before the AI needs it, instead of […]
Your ESP32 Product Ships With the Doors Unlocked: Secure Boot and Flash Encryption Explained
Take a fresh microcontroller out of the box, flash your firmware, and it just runs. Flash a completely different firmware and it runs that one just as happily; it has no particular loyalty to the code you consider yours. Connect an inexpensive adapter and read the flash back, and the bytes come off unencrypted. The […]
SEP Welcomes Quentin Law as Vice President of Finance
SEP, a 100% employee-owned software product development firm, announces the hiring of Quentin Law as Vice President of Finance. Quentin brings over 22 years of finance leadership to guide the company’s financial strategy and operations. “Quentin’s background across Big 4 consulting, global manufacturing, and software gives him a well-rounded view of financial leadership,” said Traci […]
SEP Achieves CMMC Level 2 Certification
Westfield, IN — July 27, 2026 — SEP, one of Indiana’s largest software development firms, has achieved Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Level 2 certification for its development environment, reflecting full implementation of all 110 NIST SP 800-171 Rev 2 security controls with a perfect SPRS score of 110/110. CMMC Level 2 is a Department of […]
How We Modernized SEP.com to Finally Look & Work Like SEP
SEP.com (the website) has been around since 1997. We’ve had a few iterations of the website since it was first built, from a 1990s tabbed site with a Flash game player to a static HTML site that required real coding chops to make simple content tweaks to a full redesign in 2020 with help from […]
Local LLMs for Software Development: Where We Are Today
Local LLMs can do software development work today if you get the hardware, model, and harness right. Here's the full stack I'm running, with real speed numbers.
Faster Coding Means Slower Everything Else
At some point in the last year, my work changed: I was spending more time reviewing code than writing it. I can’t point to the moment it happened, there was no process change, no deliberate decision… I just looked back at the last year and noticed what had happened. Once I noticed it, I started […]
Meet Our 2026 Summer Interns!
At SEP, interns aren’t here to fetch coffee or build something that gets shelved at the end of August. From day one, they’re on real project teams, writing code that ships, contributing to business decisions, and doing work that actually matters to real clients. It’s the same standard we hold for everyone here. This summer, […]
Custom AI vs. Off-the-Shelf: Stop Asking If, Start Asking Where
A client came to us with a clear vision: build a scheduling app for their staffing business, complete with a natural language interface so managers could describe scheduling constraints in plain English instead of wrestling with a GUI. They knew exactly what they needed custom AI for. They were wrong. Custom AI is software built […]
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, […]
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.
.NET
Android
Angular
Appium
AWS
Azure
Figma
Flutter
GitHub
GitHub Copilot
iOS
Miro
NextJS
Playwright
Python
Qt
React
TypeScript
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.