Practices Articles
We’re Picking Tools for a Different Developer Now
A colleague of mine, Joe Coy, recently told me something that stuck with me. His team had chosen Maestro over Appium for mobile UI testing. The team’s reasoning made a lot of sense: Maestro was lightweight and easier to set up. By every traditional measure, it was the right call. Then they started using an […]
How to Hire a Custom Software Development Firm (No Technical Background Required)
A Note From the Author: As SEP’s Director of Marketing, I conduct all of our mid- and post-project client interviews. The same theme comes up again and again from people who went through this process for the first time: they had no idea what to look for, and no one made it easy to figure […]
Agentic Software Development Requires Good Engineering Practices
I’ve recently started working on a client project that is using Agentic AI to develop a sizable mobile application with a medium sized team. There are a couple of lessons I’m learning about how AI and architecture fit together. We have found the number of lines of code each developer generates is far more than […]
Treat Your AI Workflow Like You Treat Your Code
I kept having the same argument with Claude. Not a dramatic one. More like the low-grade friction of a coworker who keeps formatting the PR description wrong no matter how many times you fix it. The AI would reach for the wrong abstraction. I’d correct it. Next session, same mistake. I’d correct it again. And […]
The AI Collaboration Paradox
One of our teams at SEP has gone all-in on agentic development. I don’t mean they’re simply using AI tools heavily; I mean they’re deliberately redesigning their team processes, shared infrastructure, and ways of working around it. When I was talking to the team about their experiences, one thing kept jumping out at me: AI […]
Where AI Fatigue Actually Comes From
If you’ve spent time with agentic development, you’ve probably felt that particular flavor of mental exhaustion that hits harder than the work seems to justify. I wasn’t stuck on a hard problem. I wasn’t debugging something gnarly. I was just… keeping up. And then suddenly I wasn’t. Steve Yegge calls this the AI Vampire: the […]
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 […]