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.
Looking for something specific? Search the archives!
A Million Lines of Markdown and No Code
I recently learned about a company that has rebuilt waterfall from scratch – on purpose, with AI – while believing they’re doing the most modern software development possible. The oldest failure in software process, the one we spent fifty years learning our way out of, wearing this year’s tooling. And the AI is executing it […]
So, AI Killed Your Code Review Process. Now What?
Old software engineering lessons for an agentic world.
What Are Embedded Systems? A Definition (with Cool Animal Facts)
What are embedded systems, you ask? We have two offerings: a no-frills, honest description; and a tale of giraffes and sparrows that will hone your intuition.
At SEP, an Idea Is Enough
What I learned from turning a question into an internal debate series. The Question That Started It When I first had the idea for an internal debate series at SEP, there was no plan behind it. There was just a question I thought could lead to a worthwhile conversation: Is AI making us incompetent under […]
Getting Physical with AI (2): A System 1 Brain for My Musubi-Making Agent
I made a YouTube video covering most of what’s in this post, complete with clips of the robot in action. If you’d rather watch than read, check out the video here: My musubi agent already has a body, the SO-101 robotic arm I built in my last post. Now the challenge is to build the brain that […]
Getting Physical with AI (1): A Body for My Musubi-Making Agent
AI agents are pretty fantastic. I use tools like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code daily to code and learn, and they’re a massive help. My biggest complaint is their usefulness today is trapped in the digital realm. And digital agents can’t place a slice of grilled Spam onto a bed of rice or fold nori, […]
Celebrating Nearly 30 Years: Chris Atkinson Announces Retirement
Westfield, IN — August 31, 2026 —After nearly three decades of shaping who SEP is and how we work, Chris Atkinson, our Chief Delivery Officer, has announced his retirement, effective August 31, 2026. Chris joined SEP in 1997, coming from an engineering role at UPS after earning his Electrical Engineering degree from Purdue University in […]
ESP32 Secure Boot and Flash Encryption: A Practical Setup Guide
In the first post we made the case for the two locks (secure boot for integrity, flash encryption for confidentiality) and introduced the one idea that governs everything else: these protections only move forward. You can turn them on, but never turn them off. Now let’s actually turn them on. We’ll use the ESP32 (specifically […]
Eight Donors, One Truck: Fresh Food for 21 Indiana Counties
The SEP Foundation joins seven other donors to fund a refrigerated truck expanding Gleaners’ fresh food delivery across Central and Southeast Indiana Westfield, Indiana – Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana is purchasing a 26-foot refrigerated box truck with support from eight donors, including the SEP Foundation. The truck can transport approximately 20,000 pounds of food […]
What Fast-Changing AI Tools Mean for Choosing a Design Partner
Ask a designer what’s essential to their process right now and you’ll get a very different answer than you would have a year ago. Coffee, a decent mouse, a pack of Sharpies, sure. But increasingly, a stack of AI tools that didn’t exist twelve months ago, layered inside the tools that did. That pace of […]
Everybody Agrees You Should Hire Junior Engineers. Almost Nobody Does.
A colleague, Charles Penn, asked me recently what I thought the future looked like for junior engineers. He’s someone who always keeps the human element in view, and he’d been reading the same things I had. Juniors wondering out loud whether they’d be unhirable in a few years. Companies saying the quiet part out loud: […]
The Most Expensive Software Decision Happens Before You Write a Line of Code
A Story We’ve Lived More Than Once Early in our relationship with one client, we were building two products simultaneously while they had a third underway with another vendor. Same goals, same timeline, but each product came to us, or them, with a different level of definition. What unfolded was something we’ve seen many times […]
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.