Programming Articles

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SEP Wins TechPoint’s 2025 Exceptional Employer Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Tech Employer, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named Exceptional Employer by TechPoint at the 26th annual Mira Awards. This award recognizes companies that are developing talent through skills-based hiring…
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Success! 🙌 Finishing the Migration from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS

In Migrating from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS – Part One, I went into depth about our migration. We containerized our CI/CD using Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and the Amazon EC2 Container Service Plugin for Jenkins. This allowed us the flexibility of defining all of the required types of build agents as different […]
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How to Migrate from Heroku Continuous Integration (CI) to Jenkins on AWS Like a Pro

In a recent blog post, I spoke about a migration from Heroku to AWS. I discussed the solution that Todd Trimble and I did for a client project. If you are interested in the backstory of this migration, you should check that out. In this post, I would like to dive into what we did […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Integrate and Deploy React with Phoenix

You’ve just finished your lightning fast Phoenix JSON API, what’s next? Motivation My most recent side project, Contact, is a JSON REST API written with Elixir and Phoenix, designed to be the backend to an instant messaging application (e.g., Slack). There was a hackathon coming up at SEP, and I thought it’d be fun to make a frontend for […]
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How to Evaluate if You Need to Move from Heroku to AWS

In June of 2017, I was asked to evaluate AWS for one of our major client programs. The client was utilizing Heroku for their Cloud solution and at our urging, as well as other external influencers, leaning more toward AWS. We needed to determine if they should move from Heroku to AWS. We set up […]
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Stop Using Variables – Learning Through Constraints

My new year’s resolution for 2017 was to stop using variables. My goal was to force some learning by applying a constraint to my work. Over the course of the year, I attempted this while writing various types of code: Restful api endpoints – good. It felt quite natural to write code without variables in […]
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3 Xamarin.Forms Tricks to Maximize Shared UI Code in Mobile Development

In 2014 I was tasked with creating a relatively simple iOS/Android app from scratch using this newfangled mobile app development technology called Xamarin.Forms. I was on the project for a total of three days. I had years of C#/WPF experience but none in Xamarin, and this Forms business was the confounding icing on the proverbial […]
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A minor shift in mindset that improved my SQL

I am currently working on a project that involves writing stored functions in PostgreSQL. Typically the goal is one SQL query that returns all the data needed by a particular web page. At first I approached this from an Object Oriented perspective with a focus on minimizing redundant data. This led me down the path […]
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