Matt Swanson (SEP Alum)

Podcasts are a sneaky, underrated way to learn things during time that you might be otherwise wasting. I drive 30 minutes to and from the office every day. That adds up to 5 hours a week of listening time for podcasts or audiobooks. My phone automatically downloads new episodes and I use an adapter to […]

Originally published at mdswanson.com I’ve been having conversations at SEP about how to evaluate software project opportunities for our firm. We can talk about things like the what the project is, whether or not we think the client will be good to work with, or the size and budget of the company. These are all useful […]

Recently, we helped a client build their first software product: an iOS app. When it came time to release the app into the App Store, our client asked an innocent question: “So…should our app be free or paid?” We were able to advise them on a direction that made sense for their project, but I […]

The following document is based on advice shared with all new employees (SEPeers) on their first day at the company. SEP was started in 1988 by four engineers who thrived on challenging projects and continuous learning. They wanted to build a company where software engineers – not sales – worked directly with clients to streamline […]

I find it easy to rattle off a few marketing ideas for software products. I’ve read enough HackerNews and pop-business books to know the gist of it. Got a product for agile development teams? Why not just run some LinkedIn ads that target scrum masters at software companies? Boom. You are welcome for this brilliant […]

1. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master The Pragmatic Programmer is widely considered as one of the most important books for developers. Even though it was written over 10 years ago, it holds up extremely well over time because it focuses less of specific technologies and more on solid methodologies and fundamental skills. For […]

I’ve been reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. I haven’t gotten far, but I like the concept of “thoughts addressed to yourself”. So when I came across Sean Cassidy’s post on collecting reminders to himself, I decided to take 15 minutes and do the same. Some of this list is very personal, other items are widely applicable. […]

When building a business or software, it is easy to make assumptions about what the market will want or how users will interact with your product. Recently, the concept of the Lean Startup Experiment has emerged to help us explicitly acknowledge these assumptions and construct small experiments to validate our assumptions. Here at SEP, we […]

This post originally appeared on Matt’s personal blog In my continuing quest to get code out of Android Activities, I’ve implementedthe traditional “Form Model” pattern in a recent project with great success and wantedto share my thoughts. The basic idea is to extract the code for handling the UI interactions, as wellas the data binding […]