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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Installing FoodCritic on Windows

FoodCritiic is a linter for Chef Cookbooks. It does an automated code review on your Chef Cookbook and reports violations. See the FoodCritiic home page for a list of violations and how to fix them. Here are steps I used to install it on Windows. Install Ruby Install Ruby DevKit. I put in C:\Ruby-DevKit cd […]
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SEP DevOps Ignite Talks – Docker

This is the next in the series of DevOps Ignite talks that were given at SEP in January to present the different tools available for software configuration and deployment.  It was a talk about Docker and its capabilities.  Below are the slides from the talk. Docker slides from Jyotsna Raghuraman
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Load Balancing with Nginx and Docker

The previous post showed how to use Nginx as a reverse proxy to an ASP.NET Core application running in a separate Docker container. This time, I’ll show how to use a similar configuration to spin up multiple application containers and use Nginx as a load balancer to spread traffic over them. Desired architecture The architecture […]
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App Crashing on 32-bit Devices When Resigning Xamarin.iOS IPAs

Recently on a project, we were receiving reports from some users that the iOS app we had developed with Xamarin was crashing immediately after opening the application, but only on certain devices. Basically the application would display the splash screen for a second or two, then would immediately return to the home screen. Once we were able […]
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Puppet – Configuration Management Ignite Talk

I recently gave my very first ignite talk, which was on a configuration management tool called Puppet. The short version of the already short ignite talk is: Puppet is cool. You should understand it enough to feel comfortable keeping it in your toolbox. Puppet – Simple Configuration Management from Mike Rogers
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Nginx Reverse Proxy to ASP.NET Core – Separate Containers

The previous blog post showed how to setup a reverse proxy between Nginx and an ASP.NET Core application. In that example, both Nginx and the Kestrel process ran in the same box. As alluded to, there is another (preferable) option. This time, we’ll create two separate containers: one for the application and one for the […]
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Nginx Reverse Proxy to ASP.NET Core – Same Container

As mentioned in the previous post, it is recommended to use something other than Kestrel as the front-line web server. In this example, I’m going to show how to use Nginx as a reverse proxy to the ASP.NET Core application. Reverse-proxy architecture options In terms of architecture setup for reverse proxying for ASP.NET Core in […]
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SEP Named Best Places to Work Hall of Fame Company

They come from throughout the state and across 25 industries. They are the 100 honorees on the 2017 Best Places to Work in Indiana list. In this week’s announcement, the Indiana Chamber of Commerce said that nearly half (49) of the winners are from the small employer category and almost a third (32) are first-time […]
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[DevOps Guild] SaltStack Configuration Management

Some time ago, I gave an ignite talk here at our SEP Dev Ops guild meeting discussing SaltStack.  It’s a wondrous configuration management tool with a load of features.  The slides are available at the bottom of this post, but first… Context Much of what the slides contain is more about the capabilities of SaltStack […]
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