SEP Alumni

I was working with a client trying to decide on long and short DateFormats for an international mobile application.  (Yes, that’s a mouthful.) I wasn’t able to quickly find any documentation on the Java SimpleDateFormat strings by locale…so I did what any Passionate Programmer would do, and I wrote a method to do it for […]

As smartphones continue to gain popularity, the demand for mobile applications also continues to grow.  The increase in usage of smartphones elevated the issue of “multitasking” on mobile devices.  (I’m not going to go into details of my opinions on the myth and illusion of multitasking.) Ultimately, users want to have multiple applications running, syncing […]

Persuasive Business Proposals by Dr. Tom Sant What’s the point? The point of this book is to write clearly and concisely, to differentiate yourself, and to better equip yourself with tools for writing persuasively.  Ultimately, this book is designed to help you and your company write winning proposals. How was it? Good.  I honestly felt […]

If you’re anything like me, you probably get a TON of email each and every day. In addition, you probably get emails that span a conversation over multiple days. Well, Outlook 2010 has this amazing feature called, Conversations. This will transform your inbox to look/feel more like a threaded forum (or, more like your gmail […]

Okay, I don’t think it’s a secret that I REALLY enjoy working at SEP. However, I’m going to continue to brag about this company. Recently, SEP was awarded the #1 BEST place to work in Indiana! That is some exciting stuff. Today, when I went to Google and searched for “beast place to work in Indiana”, […]

Our industry often sets its context too small to address the question of why software is so expensive. While addressing costs, we missed optimizing the other side of the equation – VALUE. To move to a new level of optimization, we need to expand the context of our development process to engage more of the […]

The Lean Software and Systems Consortium conference in Atlanta left me with a lot to think about. My main reason to go was to learn more about becoming a more agile enterprise but that is a topic for another day. To summarize my previous post, software projects are often categorized as “too expensive”.  However, it […]

Last week, we had 3 days of training.  Jeff Patton came in to talk to us about usability, and how to work with our clients to make sure we produce something they actually need.  He introduced ideas and concepts that weren’t entirely new…he simply put the ideas and concepts together in a process that makes […]

We recently used Balsamiq Mockups to redesign a set of web pages.  I’ve done a lot of designs on paper, in HTML, using FrontPage and even Visio before, and now I know, I was doing it the hard way every time. Balsamiq offers a way to present user interface designs quickly and easily.  It has […]