Hackathon Articles

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SEP Named a Best Places to Work Company for 14th Consecutive Year

SEP has once again been recognized as one of Indiana’s Best Places to Work for the 14th year consecutive year. The statewide survey and award program evaluates participating organizations and honors those with the highest levels of employee satisfaction and…

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Software developer in SEP t-shirt examines code on computer screen

2023 Winter Hackathon Recap + 3 Reasons We ♥ Hackathons at SEP

SEP’s bi-annual hackathon was a full weekend of fun projects and exciting learnings. Read on to learn more about the importance of hackathons to SEP’s culture and for a recap of what projects we tackled during our Winter 2023 Hackathon session. Three Reasons We ❤ Hackathons at SEP Besides the obvious things like the fact […]

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Person looking at their reflection in a water-filled pothole. Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

How I Used Indianapolis Pothole Data To Navigate My First SEP Hackathon

In March 2022, two senior SEP engineers and I built a Hackathon project together. In brief, the project aimed to give users a report ranking their routes to work based on the number of potholes they would encounter along the way. We had a great time, and were able to reach our goals. The project […]

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person with painted nails tapping smartphone screen on the table

3 Reasons to Use Storybook for Your React Native Project

I adopted a dog several months ago. A roly-poly Shar Pei mix. The decision to take him home was easy. Navigating the adoption process was not. The UX of adopting a dog online is haphazard. You find the dog on your pet adoption app, and you send a message to the shelter in the app […]

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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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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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5 Products Built During Our Hackathon That We Actually Used

When we run company hackathons we end up with quite a variety of ideas. The teams working on these projects always get something out of them regardless of whether the projects continue on past the weekend. We do have some projects that go further than fun over the weekend. These are the products that we […]

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How We Run Company Hackathons

We’ve been running hackathons at SEP since 2011. Over the years we’ve experimented with the setup. It’s ranged from actual product pitches to technology explorations (and everything in between). Recent hackathons have settled into a pattern that works well for us. That pattern includes: Pitches Q & A Form teams Build Demos Our hackathons run […]

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How to Subscribe to SharePoint RSS Feeds Without NTLM Authentication

Save the Planet For the past couple of months, I have been rebuilding an internal tool we use at SEP called Planet. This tool aggregates blog posts from many sources, including our official SEP blog, personal blogs, and internal SharePoint blogs. After a recent upgrade to our SharePoint instance, Planet was in trouble! The SharePoint […]

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