SEP Alumni

Recent Articles

The Intern and New Hire Summer Reading List

1. The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master The Pragmatic Programmer is widely considered as one of the most important books for developers. Even though it was written over 10 years ago, it holds up extremely well over time because it focuses less of specific technologies and more on solid methodologies and fundamental skills. For […]
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Ollert Is Now Open Source

Ollert, the Trello data analytics tool, has been open sourced under GNU Affero GPL v3.0. The source code can be found on Github and I’ve already accepted several pull requests. Why? I’ve been working towards this for a few months now. Although Ollert was a lot of fun to create and has helped quite a […]
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Managing a Go Environment in Ubuntu

Many moons ago, I wrote about setting up a Go environment in Ubuntu. After writing that post, I dropped Go development for nearly a year. Today I run the Indy Golang meetup, and soon I’ll be starting a new work project where I’ll be recommending a Go-based tech stack. I’ve learned a thing or two […]
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Personal Meditations on Software

I’ve been reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. I haven’t gotten far, but I like the concept of “thoughts addressed to yourself”. So when I came across Sean Cassidy’s post on collecting reminders to himself, I decided to take 15 minutes and do the same. Some of this list is very personal, other items are widely applicable. […]
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1. Big Data. 2. Now what?

True confessions: I am learning R, finally, after living and loving SPSS for many years. I am no expert in Big Data, having only been responsible for about 40GBs (about a million records of a thousand variables each) of data goodness in a previous work-life. [For an answer to What is Big Data, see this article.] […]
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2015 – Looking Ahead

The beginning of each year is often the time to look back on the previous and speak about the future. At our last company meeting we announced Raman Ohri’s promotion to President of SEP. Raman gave the employees a great overview of where we are going and what goals he has for the company. The […]
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Running Lean Startup Experiments Internally

When building a business or software, it is easy to make assumptions about what the market will want or how users will interact with your product. Recently, the concept of the Lean Startup Experiment has emerged to help us explicitly acknowledge these assumptions and construct small experiments to validate our assumptions. Here at SEP, we […]
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An SEP History Lesson: When an Enthusiastic Newbie Convinced Us to Get a Fishtank

I’ve had several people tell me they liked the new fishtank design (thank you!), and it was suggested that I do a write-up about the tank.  I’m always happy to talk about it!  I’ll start with some history… How it Began It all started around 10 years ago.  I was interviewing for a position at SEP, […]
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Getting even more value from your daily standup…

Many teams around here are familiar with the “famous 3” standup questions… What did you do yesterday? What will you do today? What impediments do you have? This is a good way to get the team in the habit of communicating each day. A few of my teams have gotten even more value out of our […]
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