Practices 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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Think Software Maintenance is Expensive? Here’s Why It’s Worth the Investment.

The world of software and software development moves at lightning speed. Every day, new tools are introduced. Languages and frameworks are upgraded. App store requirements change. Operating systems are updated. New hardware is announced. So, what happens if the software world evolves but your software codebase doesn’t? Development Tools Chain Reaction Development tools continue to […]
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Software Design Accessibility Audits 101: What You Need to Know

Accessibility in software design is an important topic that often gets overlooked or deprioritized. The good news is, addressing accessibility does not need to be a giant undertaking. In this post, I’ll give an overview of accessibility laws and how you can conduct your own software accessibility audit. This won’t make you an expert on […]
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Focus Your Product Perspective

Have you ever tried to work with someone with the best of intentions, but it ends in a shouting match? Or walking away with the same or more problems than you started? A colleague was dealing with helping their client with upcoming milestones, and it felt like a similar situation was inevitable. He wanted to […]
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New Leads Need The Engagement Chronicle

On the last day of a 20 month-long project, my customer asked me, “Could you give a brief overview of everything you guys have done for us over the last couple of years?” 😅 As a new lead, I hadn’t thought of starting an engagement chronicle until closer to the end of the project. By […]
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Circumventing The Dark Side of Design

A Tale Old As Time Humans have had the tendency to be deceptive to one another for longer than any existing historical document can recall. One of the most infamous examples of this act being used as a literary device is the myth of the Trojan Horse in Homer’s Odyssey. This victory trophy, given to […]
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Adding a Design Practice at Lessonly – a Podcast Recap

On this episode of Behind the Product, Jaki Clark and Casey Cumbow join us to share their journey of adding a design practice into Lessonly‘s well-established engineering and product development groups. As design and engineering leaders, Jaki and Casey share the techniques, practices, and systems that have helped Lessonly level up over the past 18 months.
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Avoiding False Starts with Artificial Intelligence

Blog Post Written By: Lisa Lo Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer science fiction; it’s here today, and it’s here to stay. It is in the products you use every day: home automation, digital assistants, and credit card fraud detection, to name a few. AI will affect all businesses in the near future, and the […]
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Five Things I Learned Working with Software Engineers

Introduction Hi, I’m Jordan Thayer, and I’m a research scientist by training. I got my PhD in 2012 from the University of New Hampshire, where I focused on Artificial Intelligence. My undergraduate degree  was in Computer Science too; I got that from Rose-Hulman back in 2006. I’ve been programming things for about as long as […]
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Reclaiming Lost Time with Podcasts

Podcasts are a sneaky, underrated way to learn things during time that you might be otherwise wasting. I drive 30 minutes to and from the office every day. That adds up to 5 hours a week of listening time for podcasts or audiobooks. My phone automatically downloads new episodes and I use an adapter to […]
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Refactoring JavaScript – a play in three acts

“the JavaScript Code” by Dmitry Baranovskiy is licensed under CC BY 2.0 Originally published on my personal blog. Act 1, the setup Once upon a time, there was a JavaScript codebase. This codebase used the function expression syntax: const returnTheNumberOne = () => 1; For reasons that aren’t relevant to this blog post, I needed […]
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