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 Wins TechPoint’s 2024 Innovation Service Partner of the Year Mira Award
SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Innovation Service Partner, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named the Innovation Service Partner of the Year by TechPoint at the 25th annual Mira Awards. The Mira Awards, Indiana’s largest…
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Co-worker 1: “Hey…is our Jenkins even running?” Me: “Uhh, yes? What do you mean?” CW1: “Well, I’ve pushed 3 different commits, and it hasn’t told me that the build failed.” Me: “Neat. Good job not breaking the build?” CW1: “Oh wait, Jenkins only notifies us when it fails, that’s right.” Me: “Right…but it would be […]
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Beware of Solving Things Yourself
There’s one recurring thing I’ve seen new hires at SEP struggle with over the years. Most commonly, this is something we see in hires that are fresh out of college, but sometimes it shows itself in hires that come to us with years of experience in the industry. While we try to eliminate it in our new […]
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“Have It Your Way” Software
Have It Your Way is an iconic slogan from Burger King. Letting the customer pick and chose whatever toppings and condiments they want works really great when you are making burgers. Customization is good for the customer and the business. If BK only sold hamburgers with pickles, they would lose the business of anyone who […]
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Why should I care what my code looks like?
Someone said to me recently “I don’t care what the code looks like, as long as it works.” This offended me because I take pride in making my code look nice and easy to read. Plus it makes me happy to develop clean code. But why should you care? I was on a project that […]
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Been There, Done That
“Been there, done that” is a dangerous phrase in software engineering. I recently watched Ben Orenstein’s talk “Refactoring From Good to Great“, and it got me thinking about how easy it is to become complacent with your code, design patterns, and solutions. If “been there, done that” is your attitude toward the problems you’re faced […]
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Code Reviews – the way it should be?
This past Monday and Tuesday, I attended all-day training sessions led by David Hussman. He’s a big Agile guy, but more than Agile he kind of picks and chooses the parts he believes work – i.e. he’s huge on TDD and pair programming and continuous integration. Pointedly, he said if you don’t have the chops […]
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Usability, and more…
Last week, we had 3 days of training. Jeff Patton came in to talk to us about usability, and how to work with our clients to make sure we produce something they actually need. He introduced ideas and concepts that weren’t entirely new…he simply put the ideas and concepts together in a process that makes […]
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