
Sandbox 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 Named a Winning Company in the 2022 Powderkeg Unvalley Awards
Westfield, IN - January 2022, SEP, a software product design and development firm has been announced as a winning company in the 2022 Powderkeg Unvalley Awards. This recognizes SEP as one of the best tech companies to work for in…
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Since the success of the first Game Jam, I have eagerly awaited the next one. It is a chance to improve our processes, attract more people, and of course make another game. Judah and I had a retro and came up with some ideas to improve the jam. We didn’t pose them as formally as […]
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What We Learned from SEP’s First Game Jam
Earlier this year, SEP put on its first-ever game jam. For those unfamiliar, a game jam is an event where teams create video games within a limited amount of time. While the time span can vary wildly, there is usually a theme to provide direction. Most game jams also tend to declare a winner. Why […]
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2022 Summer Hackathon Recap
We were thrilled to have our SEP Summer 2022 Hackathon in our new building and to be back in person for the event! Our hackathon is an internal event where we invite SEP makers to participate for the weekend – anyone with an interest within our walls can join the fun. We see a mix […]
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This one’s for you, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi fans
If you’ve read Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, or even if you’ve just seen a diagram like this one and it inspired you to figure out which activities put you in flow… boy, do I have a blog post for you ???? I have to admit I never read the book, […]
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Sector Director – An Exploration into Classic Graphics Programming
This is the third post in my series on the value of personal projects. Check out the first and second posts for context. Sector Director Sector Director is an on-going (as of writing) project to create my own 3D renderer for the 1993 game Doom. There is nothing terribly novel about this – tons of […]
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Tiledriver – Making Wolfenstein 3D Levels with Machine Learning
This is the second post in my series on the value of personal projects. See the first one for more context. Marrying the Old with the New Tiledriver was an attempt to create levels for the classic 1992 game Wolfenstein 3D using machine learning. I thought this would be a fun challenge since I didn’t […]
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The Value of Personal Projects
Personal projects can be a great way to explore ideas, concepts, or frameworks before you use them on an actual work project. As somewhat of a staple of SEP’s Hackathons, I’d like to highlight some of my philosophies around personal projects and the value I’ve gotten out of them. I worked on all the projects […]
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Analyze the Crap Out of Your Apple Health/HealthKit Data
As a recent iPhone + Apple Watch convert (see ya, Android and FitBit) my fitness tracking data lives in Apple Health. I want to make charts and graphs and see trends over time (you get the idea, I’m an engineer, I wantneed to engineer and analyze my fitness data). Problem is, there’s not a great way […]
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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 […]
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