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 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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My Ideal Software Project: 7 Values I Believe In…

At SEP, we have very diverse teams, clients, and projects. With all of that variety and diversity, comes a lot of variation in how projects are run. Almost every project, in my experience, has used different processes and techniques. I was recently inspired by one of my coworkers, Jennifer, by a letter that she wrote […]
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SEP hex pattern overlay of person working on laptop

Making and Changing Plans

We all make plans everyday. Small plans, big plans, short term plans and long term plans. We plan for retirement; we plan for the weekend and we plan for our next meal. We make plans for everything and hope nothing changes. But inevitably our best laid schemes gang aft agley. Gang’ing Aft Agley So what […]
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Plan to Change

How many of you have a personal 5-year plan? Ok, I see a few hands raised. How many of you have a plan for the project you are on right now? Ok, lots of raised hands again. Now, how many of you have feared changes to your plans? Come on, be honest… Yep, most of us […]
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Changing Plans – Blog Jam

There is some friction between agile methodologies and the desire for upfront formal requirements that has really been bugging me lately. I often find myself wanting to have my cake and eat it too: I want clear and final requirements, but I don’t want to be forced to design an entire system upfront and drown […]
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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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More Complicated Than It Has To Be

A Dirty Phrase “More Complicated Than It Has To Be” is about as dirty a thing I can imagine saying to another developer in relation to their code or solution to a given problem. Sometimes that’s a result of ignorance of a simple helper method which does the thing they’ve coded, or maybe they’ve decided […]
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The Connected Engineer

One of the hats I wear at SEP is Recruiting Director – I’m responsible for the engineering talent we bring in. I was recently asked how recruiting has changed over time, things we’re looking for now that we didn’t before. The core criteria (must have’s, if you will) haven’t changed for us: Smart, Fit, and […]
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My Favorite Line(s) of Code

Onwards to Round 2 in our current blog battle here at SEP. This time I’ve been asked to write about my favorite line(s) of code. Unfortunately, I don’t have some fancy Ruby, Haskell, or Clojure to dazzle you with. My recent tenure spent managing projects leaves me with little time to focus on the latest […]
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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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