SEP Alumni

Recent Articles

Angular logo

JSON Web Token Prevents Upgrade to Angular 6

The Setup This is a short episode of a software engineer’s experience with one node package bump-in-the-road upgrading to Angular 6. My team is building medical applications using Angular. Obviously, the application’s network transactions require a level of security. JSON Web Tokens, or JWT, is a package we depend on for secure network transactions. Here’s a brief overview […]

Announcing PlanetEx: an open source blog aggregator written in Elixir

A long time ago, a few developers at SEP built a program to aggregate employee’s personal and internal SharePoint blogs. They called it Planet, after planet.rb, the Ruby gem they used to build it. Unfortunately, our old Planet met its inevitable demise after an upgrade to our SharePoint instance that broke some compatibility. I decided this […]

The Potential Of Role-Inclusive Designers

When we were in elementary school, most of us were disengaged or restless when our teacher switched subjects to one that wasn’t enjoyable nor personally easy to learn. Then, in middle school, some of us really needed to take a long bathroom break during that one class with that one teacher who seemed mad, hard […]

Reclaiming Lost Time with Podcasts

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 […]

How to Subscribe to SharePoint RSS Feeds Without NTLM Authentication

Save the Planet For the past couple of months, I have been rebuilding an internal tool we use at SEP called Planet. This tool aggregates blog posts from many sources, including our official SEP blog, personal blogs, and internal SharePoint blogs. After a recent upgrade to our SharePoint instance, Planet was in trouble! The SharePoint […]

Evaluating project opportunities

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 criteria when talking […]
SEP Book Club and Review for Creating Great Teams

Reading Lately — Teams, Orgs, and Vision

Previously I shared my “Reading Lately” list with a few books about motivation. Each publication from that list is still relevant in my thoughts, actions, and discussions with others at SEP. This time I am sharing 4 books that have greatly influenced the way I think about working collaboratively with people — whether on a […]

Should my mobile app be free or paid?

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 […]

Building with Elm at SEP Makes

Preface For the last few months, I’d been working on my side project Contact, a JSON REST API written with Elixir and Phoenix, designed to be the backend to an instant messaging platform. I thought that SEP’s semi-annual hackathon: SEP: Makes, would be the perfect time to make a front end application for Contact, but […]