
SEP Blog
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…
Read More

Why are we discussing manual testing vs. automated testing? Good question. I’ll preface by saying this article will not discuss the general importance or necessity of testing. At SEP, it is an integral part of our development process. However, the methods and extent to which our client or we decide to test can vary greatly. […]
Read More
Automated Testing for CloudFormation Templates
CloudFormation is a powerful tool that allows you to define your AWS infrastructure as code. And like any piece of software, testing is an important part of the software development lifecycle. This is especially important when practicing continuous delivery or continuous deployment. In this post, I will walk through a working example of a CI/CD […]
Read More

Migrating from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS – Part Two
In the previous post, I went into depth about our migration from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS by containerizing 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 different types of build agents we required as […]
Read More

Migrating from Heroku CI to Jenkins on AWS – Part One
In a recent blog post, I spoke about a migration from Heroku to AWS that Todd Trimble and I did for a client project. If you are interested in some of the backstory of this migration, you should check that out. In this post I would like to dive into what we did to move […]
Read More

Integrate and Deploy React with Phoenix
Originally posted at mitchellhanberg.com 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 […]
Read More

Virtual Machine Pains and How Vagrant Can Help You
In my last project we were upgrading the database for the application from Oracle 11g to Oracle 12c. I created and configured a VirtualBox Virtual Machine (VM) using these instructions. Then I started to think about how I was going to maintain the VM over the duration of the Project and for future work. This […]
Read More

Installing FoodCritic on Windows
FoodCritiic is a linter for Chef Cookbooks. It does an automated code review on your Chef Cookbook and reports violations. See the FoodCritiic home page for a list of violations and how to fix them. Here are steps I used to install it on Windows. Install Ruby Install Ruby DevKit. I put in C:\Ruby-DevKit cd […]
Read More
Creating a Chef Cookbook for Windows
The Berkshelf documentation moved to the “official” Chef docs. I found it a little confusing but complete. The purpose of this post is to remind future self how to do this, without having to dig through the docs again. These instruction assume the following is installed ChefDK Version 1.1.16 Vagrant Vagrant winrm plugin VirtualBox I create […]
Read More
Ignite DevOps 2017 @ SEP – Chef
Last week I blogged about the Ignite Talks that happened at SEP last month. See below for the slides from the Chef Ignite Talk. Ignite Talk on Chef from Bob Nowadly
Read More
SEP Ignite DevOps 2017
Last month at SEP, our DevOp guild hosted an internal meeting of Ignite Talks. The theme for the talks was Configuration Management. Below is a slide deck I used to kick off the meeting. Over the next several weeks we will post more slides for the talks on Chef, Salt-Stack, Puppet, Docker, Packer and Mac Automation. […]
Read More