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 Selected as a Nominee for TechPoint’s Innovation Mira Award

TechPoint has announced the nominees for its 25th annual Mira Awards, highlighting the most innovative companies, universities, and organizations in Indiana’s tech sector. The awards celebrate achievements across various categories, including the Innovation Partner of the Year. Nominees in this…
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Code Analysis: Fluid Call Tree

Let’s elaborate on the nature of these call tree diagrams.  Consider the following code: void doStuff() { doOtherStuff(); } void doOtherStuff() { init(); final(); } void blah( int x ) { if ( x == 2 ) { function(); otherFunction(); } else { doStuff(); } } Depending on the input for the blah function, we […]
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Code Analysis: Shared Mutable State

My previous post asserts that mutable state can cause a software engineer issues in understanding the program because it becomes arbitrarily hard to understand when two different parts of a program are actually connected.  This is also why some sort of run time debugging facility is needed in order to understand some types of code. […]
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Code Analysis: Mutable State

Mutable state gets a bad rap when you talk to pure functional programmers.  I don’t think mutable state is inherently a problem, but it does have an effect on your ability to understand a program.  So let’s look at what happens when you introduce a mutable reference into a programming language. The problem as I […]
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Code Analysis: Halting Problem

Let’s do a quick digression.  I wanted to talk about mutable state, but first I think we should consider the halting problem. The halting problem goes something like this: Halt( program_source, program_input ) { if ( <The program Halts with that input> ) return true; else return false; } // Now assume a hypothetical program […]
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Code Analysis: Introduction

There already exists a significant amount of code analysis techniques out there.  I think the existing technologies are pretty useful for tracking some aspects of why a given piece of code can be difficult to deal with.  However, I want to add a diagram technique that can be used to describe certain features in programming […]
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Problem Analysis: Overlapping Blobs

Last time we started to explore the idea that you can have a system or problem that is difficult to deal with and understand because the interactions between blobs are in some way difficult.  However, we only covered the idea that the arrows that connect blobs are complicated.  There is a similar problem when we […]
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Problem Analysis: System Complexity

The last post talked about aspects about arrows that could make a problem difficult to deal with.  Now I’m going to talk about how a collection of arrows might make a problem difficult to deal with. The complexity and difficulty of a system isn’t just going to be determined by the aspects of the blobs […]
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Problem Analysis: Continuous Functions

The last blog was the final entry talking about the aspects of blobs that cause problems to be difficult.  Now, we’re going to talk about the aspects of arrows (III) that cause problems to be difficult. Continuous functions are a familiar concept to those who have taken calculus before.  With the diagrams we’ve been using, the […]
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Problem Analysis: Path Connected

Last time we talked about blobs that have holes in them.  This time lets talk about how we might deal with a blob that is hard to deal with because the valid points in it are hard to conceptualize (either because the blob has a lot of holes or for some other reason). In topology […]
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