Practices Articles
We’re curious people by nature. And we love to teach others what we’ve learned. So explore our blog to gain fresh insights from our expertise in areas ranging from culture to AI.
SEP Wins TechPoint’s 2024 Innovation Service Partner of the Year Mira Award
SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Innovation Service Partner, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named the Innovation Service Partner of the Year by TechPoint at the 25th annual Mira Awards. The Mira Awards, Indiana’s largest…
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Reposted from my personal blog “Well, you don’t want your builds to succeed all the time…” I remember hearing that for the first time a year or two ago and thinking to myself “that’s probably one of those counter-intuitive truths that make a lot of sense in the context of Agile. This guy is probably some kind […]
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Running Lean Startup Experiments Internally
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 […]
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Striving to Be Replaceable
In the book, The Passionate Programmer, there’s a section about making sure you’re replaceable. Several of us here at SEP read that book during a book club. When my group first started this section we were taken aback. Finally, I think we teased apart two different ways of being replaceable. Bad Replaceable: Basically just be a cog in […]
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Building an API with Node, Express, and Mongoose
The first step in creating the example application is to create an API for the application to interact with. Node, Express, and Mongoose are used to create a REST API. In addition to the example code below, the full code for the API is available. Environment setup To support the API, Node and MongoDB need […]
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Human Complexity: It’s Not Just for Psych Majors Anymore!
There are complex systems, and then there are Complex Systems. And nothing makes a system more complex than dealing with people. People make things complicated. Let’s look at an example. I’ve recently been working on an employee time tracking tool. One of the tasks that this tool does is verification of a timesheet: are the minimum […]
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MVP: Escape the Valley of Death
“MVP: Escape the Valley of Death” is presented by Chris Shinkle, Director of Innovation at Software Engineering Professionals (SEP).
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Lessons Learned During the Conception of Ollert
During SEP’s previous startup weekend, I pitched an idea for a Trello Analysis Tool called Ollert. In less than three days, a team of 6 built a minimal viable product (MVP) and put it live on the internet. In a little over three months, I have slowly guided Ollert through the legal department, obtained a real domain with security, and fixed […]
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Better Testing in Go With Gocheck
As a quick reminder, golang is a really fun programming language to use. It even includes testing out of the box! Unfortunately, this out-of-the-box testing framework isn’t all that great. It lacks the syntactic sugar of mature frameworks like rspec or gtest. Of course, there are alternatives. I found an open-source library (licensed with Simplified […]
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Where is your Horizon?
Here at SEP, we sometimes use a diagram to discuss the various career paths open to our Developers. And by Developers I don’t refer solely to those who write code, but also Testers, Leads, and Managers. There are other tracks open to our staff, but these are the most common for our engineering staff. ![Career […]
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