SEP Alumni

Hitting the 25-year milestone at SEP is a source of pride. We have built a great company proving that it can and will last. For me, I hit the second 25-year mark this month as well so there is naturally some thought towards the next generation. Becoming an ESOP in 2010 was certainly a big […]

  Why do we, as humans, keep doing the same thing over and over again?  Albert Einstein would call that, insanity. Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein The most common way that I see people failing, is by trying to avoid failure. By avoid, I […]

In any profession involving performance (like music or sports), the professionals practice out of sight of their audience. They practice to get better. They push their limits and try things they’ve never tried before. When they try those things for the first time, they suck! The football player misses the catch trying out that new […]

Do you POP?  Maybe you should.  It’s a free prototyping app, currently available for iPhone but soon to be released for Android. POP is a super simple way to capture your wonderful pencil scratchings electronically and create a semi-functional wireframe that you can share with others. POP uses the camera on your phone (or existing […]

I’ve long had this opinion that building smartphone apps by writing HTML and sticking it into a native app shell is a bad idea. I’m not talking about web apps, mind you; I’m talking about apps you get from the App Store or Play Store, but really just run HTML and Javascript. My two main […]

I have been a Scrum Master for my team of 8-10 since November of 2011, and it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.  I was very lucky to land this position.  Previously I had done development and testing projects, but my only lead experience was for a team of myself […]

At SEP, we have very diverse teams, clients, and projects. With all of that variety and diversity, comes a lot of variation in how projects are run. Almost every project, in my experience, has used different processes and techniques. I was recently inspired by one of my coworkers, Jennifer, by a letter that she wrote […]

There is some friction between agile methodologies and the desire for upfront formal requirements that has really been bugging me lately. I often find myself wanting to have my cake and eat it too: I want clear and final requirements, but I don’t want to be forced to design an entire system upfront and drown […]

I have too many passwords.  I admit that I don’t always use a unique password on websites that I rate low on my ‘do I care if I get hacked’ radar.  And, unless forced, I’m terrible at remembering to change them from time to time.  On the plus side, I don’t keep passwords on post-it […]