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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 […]
Your AI Agent Doesn’t Have a Capability Problem. It Has a Communication One.
I keep hearing some version of the same complaint. It still produces slop. My job is clearly safe for a while longer. It couldn’t handle the simplest request. Some days it just seems… off. The easy conclusion is that the model isn’t good enough yet. A better one is coming, and it’ll finally get out […]
3 Things I Accidentally Learned from Corporate Jargon
Written By Over the summer, the interns and I had some giggles over the various corporate jargon we’ve heard online, at previous jobs, and even at SEP. Corporate jargon is a word or phrase commonly used in business environments to communicate ideas, processes, or strategies. We giggled because, removed from their context, these phrases seemed […]
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 […]
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Words matter when teams are working together. This glossary explains common software terms, so nothing gets lost in translation.