SEP Blog

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 2025 Exceptional Employer Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Tech Employer, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana – SEP has been named Exceptional Employer by TechPoint at the 26th annual Mira Awards. This award recognizes companies that are developing talent through skills-based hiring…
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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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3 Reasons to Use F#

Picking the best programming language is difficult because we can’t just pick the one with the largest goodness number. Obviously, these objective goodness numbers are the easiest and most reliable way to find the best language, but someone neglected to assign them. Instead we individually convert our time slowly into experiences and our experiences into […]
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SEP branded Rubix cube

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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Five Decisions Your Team Needs to Make Before Starting a Project

Huzzah! You got the project! Now what!? Here are some recommendations on what decisions you should make right now, before you start. 1. What’s the tech? Let’s start with the obvious one. Assuming you’ve decided to write some software, you’ll have to decide how to write it. Which programming language? Is your team going to […]
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Getting Started with NLP and Python

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a method of computer interaction at the intersection of human language, computer science, and machine learning. It can be thought of as a way of helping computers interpret text and speech as a human would, including understanding the subject, context, or both. This blog post will focus on getting started […]
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What Really Matters

On November 1st, the project I had been working on for seven years ended. It was an incredibly rewarding professional and technical experience. I learned what it was like to integrate into a large company and dozens of other development teams. I worked in technologies I had never worked in before, and on a code […]
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Facilitation: Don’t Lose Before You Start

So you want to facilitate a workshop for a team? Maybe you’re external to the team and have been asked to help by facilitating. Awesome, it’ll be fun. Just show up at the time and place annnnnnnd you’ve already lost. You better think (think) Think about what you’re trying to do — Aretha Franklin Ask […]
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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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