Practices Articles
How to Decide What Gets a Yes When Everything Looks Promising
Every growing company eventually hits the moment where the opportunities in front of you outnumber the people and dollars behind you. And someone has to decide what gets a “yes.” I’ve been on both sides of that. In a past life, I had to make directional decisions in a fast-growing company without a great framework […]
A Manager’s Guide to AI Adoption in Software Engineering Teams: Just Keep Prompting
AI tools for coding aren’t a nice-to-have anymore — they’re table stakes. At SEP, we recognized that early and gave engineering teams the green light to start using them, provided the tools met our security standards and our clients’. Once the green light was given, engineers across the organization were free to use AI in their work. The only stipulation: each […]
Work Notebooks 101: Types, Best Practices, and Why You Need One
Keeping track of everything we do can feel like a challenge. Solving tough problems, making important design choices, picking up new skills—there’s so much happening every day. When it’s time for career conversations, it often feels tricky to recall all the wins and lessons from the past year. I have talked with a few folks […]
Dodging Merge Conflicts in git
This article was originally posted on my personal blog under the same title, “Dodging Merge Conflicts in git.” Introduction Of all the source control management systems that have ever been created, git is certainly one of them. You’ve probably used it, and been burned by a particularly complicated merge conflict. Resolving merge conflicts can be […]
Agile Indy 2024 Trip Report
From the AgileIndy site: AgileIndy is a user group devoted to raising awareness, acceptance, and support to people who explore and apply agile values, principles, and practices to make building software solutions more effective, humane, and sustainable. This year’s conference took place on Friday October 18th at 502 E Carmel Dr, Carmel, IN 46032. A […]
Why We Critique: How to Make Peace with Your Fear of Design Critique
Designers, no matter their practice, have gone through some form of design critique in the past. Someone had to critically point out how the work needed to improve during the educational years. University programs are specifically structured with formal critiques in their curriculum; these help students get critical feedback to expand their thinking and learn […]
How to Make Bets That Pay Off: Effective Prototyping for Product Organizations
Many product organizations today face similar struggles: delivery cycles take longer than expected, timeframes are unpredictable, and schedules lead to unforeseen costs and outcomes. Often, designed, built, and delivered features go unused, ultimately failing to achieve the desired business results. We’ve seen these struggles appear when organizations pursue a solution without understanding critical assumptions about […]
Design Configuration Management: The Awesome Best Practice You Didn’t Know You Needed
We’ve had a design practice at SEP for over a decade but didn’t have an official Design Configuration Management (DCM) process until recently. For most of that time, we’ve been a pretty small group of designers who typically had their hands full doing good work for our clients. Historically, designers on a project would hit […]
Naming Your Computer: How to Do It & Why It Matters
One of the tools you will be using daily at work is your computer, and that’s why one of your first onboarding assignments is usually naming your computer. Your computer is an extension of you, your interests, and your work! At SEP, we like to give our computers a unique name that feels meaningful to […]
Using Generative AI Every Day at Work? An AI Strategist’s Honest Take
I use Generative AI tools because, as a developer, I can’t ignore them. My clients and peers expect me to be at least conversant in AI technologies if not an expert. Maintaining that expertise means engaging with new tools as they come out. I’ve made a point to use them where I could for the […]
AI Code Gen Tools Need Human Developers to Produce Good Code
Last year, AI code gen tools made a huge splash in the software development world. Again. Someone had the bright idea that “Hey, source code is text. Maybe we can generate that!”. What started as one big offering has grown to dozens of tools to write our code for us. These tools excite some, terrify others, and leave many wondering […]
Is a Lift and Shift Migration the right fit for your cloud project?
Picture this: Your team has been wrangling databases, applications, and web servers hosted and run on hundreds of VMs for years now. You have workarounds for some of the most egregious limitations, but alas… you know the time has come to replace your VMs with cloud hosting. You know that the inefficiencies and security concerns […]