Ideas, guides, and lessons from the team.

November 2025

Get Google AI Mode to Recommend Your Business

by Shaun Davidson · 13 min read

Google AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT, and other AI chatbots now have billions of combined active users. Getting AI to recommend your company is important now and will basically be required in the future. However, it's difficult to know how to do this. In this short video, Shaun shows you how.

November 2025

Conference - Let's Connect 2025

by Shaun Davidson · 1 min read

Shaun is speaking at this conference on Thursday, November 13. His session discusses AI Search engines, how we got them to recommend Sembit, and how you can apply it to your business.

November 2025

Sky-High AI Expectations

by Nathan Theophanes · 3 min read

AI tools are great but they still produce prototypes, not production-quality apps. Unfortunately, the ease of creating prototypes has led some to expect the same speed in creating full-scale applications.

July 2025

Open-Sourced: Building the C# Bridge to DataStax Astra DB

by Shaun Davidson · 3 min read

Building a production-ready C# SDK for a fast moving API - and shipping on time - sounds impossible, but our three-person team did it in six months. See how we turned Astra DB into a one-line NuGet install, kept pace with breaking changes, and helped thousands of .NET developers skip the boilerplate and start prototyping.

July 2025

6 Common Licensing Mistakes That Create Hidden Product Risk

by Mary Wang · 7 min read

...and how to avoid them without slowing down your team. Is free really free? Can I send this to a coworker? What about AI generated content? Get answers to all this and more by reading this comprehensive guide!

July 2025

Keep Your IP Private: Using Local AI Models in VS Code

by Stephen Hewitt · 5 min read

Skip the cloud and keep customer data in-house: this quick guide shows how to pair VS Code's Continue extension with Ollama so a coding-tuned LLM runs entirely on your local machine. Spin up a 1.5 B model in seconds, see what you gain from a 32 B upgrade, and choose the perfect speed-vs-accuracy trade-off for secure development.

April 2025

AI at Play: When Simpler Prompts Win

by Shaun Davidson · 4 min read

What happens when you ask all the major AI frontier models to build a clone of Settlers of Catan for the web? Our team at Sembit recently did this - here's what we learned.

April 2025

Visualizing Massively Parallel Dataflow in New E1 Processor

by Nathan Theophanes · 3 min read

How do dataflow processors work? Check out this visualizer tool we built for the new E1 processor that shows number values being routed to processing units. With a dynamic graphic, you'll understand it immediately.

April 2025

Figma 101

by Mary Wang · 24 min read

A picture might be worth a thousand words, but a functional prototype is easily worth a hundred thousand. With this quick guide you can skip the lengthy emails and learn to communicate your ideas graphically with Figma prototypes instead!

January 2025

Working From Home - 19 Ways to Fight the Dragons

by Nathan Theophanes · 3 min read

Remote work is amazing... Until the dragons come. Interruption dragon, Distraction dragon, Demotivation dragon - each one lowers your productivity and job satisfaction as you fight them. Battle-hardened staff at Sembit share dragon-slaying techniques from 15 years of working from home.

January 2025

Getting Your App in the Google Play Store

by Mary Wang · 10 min read

Excited to share your app with the Android users in your life? This resource will walk you through the elements you'll need to prepare and steps you'll need to take to release your app in the Play Store.

January 2025

Allowing Dev Partner Access to Your AWS Infrastructure

by Shaun Davidson · 3 min read

Want to collaborate securely with your development partner on AWS? This guide breaks down how to set up isolated AWS accounts for staging and production - all under your corporate billing umbrella. Learn how this approach compares to a more advanced IAM-based setup, including pros, cons, and when to keep it simple.

October 2024

Font Selection: 3 Questions You Should Ask

by Mary Wang · 5 min read

Seven raven feathers. Two eyes of newt. Then add just a dash of Times New Roman to the cauldron... Choosing a font may seem like a mysterious art only practiced by graphic designers under the light of a full moon, but it doesn't have to be! Apply these simple techniques to identify a good font.

October 2024

Processor Runs for Years on a Single AA Battery

by Nathan Theophanes · 2 min read

Today's ultra-low-power microcontrollers are amazing, using a million times less power than a single desktop CPU core. Many of these can only do one kind of computation, but Sembit is working with a cutting-edge company that achieves ultra-efficiency with a general-purpose microcontroller.

October 2024

Sembit Imposter: Don't be Tricked!

by Shaun Davidson · 3 min read

Last November, a mid-sized tech company in California called us, wanting to discuss a port of their technology to the .NET platform. Towards the end of our call, I asked how they found us. He said, "oh, Sophie reached out via email". Only problem is, nobody named Sophie has ever worked at Sembit!

July 2024

Getting Your App in the App Store

by Mary Wang · 10 min read

You've got an amazing app that you want to share with the world, and you want to release it in the Apple App Store. Most don't realize it's a multi-step process with many pieces to construct. Reading this illustrated guide will help you gather the necessary information and make app submission a breeze.

July 2024

Copilot Transcript

by Nathan Theophanes · 10 min read

A detailed log of our test with GitHub Copilot performing various programming tasks in HTML, C#, and SQL.

July 2024

Advantages of Design-First

by Shaun Davidson · 3 min read

No one wants their software project to fail. But how can you ensure success? Everything comes down to a shared understanding of what "success" means, and one primary way to achieve this is through an effective design process.

July 2024

Will AI Replace Software Developers?

by Nathan Theophanes · 3 min read

We tested Copilot, the leading AI software development tool from Microsoft, and compared its performance now versus one year ago. Here's what we discovered.

July 2024

Xamarin is Dead

by Nathan Theophanes · 2 min read

On May 1, Microsoft ended support for the Xamarin platform they purchased in 2016 that allowed developers to use C# to create Android / iOS apps. If your company still has a mobile app built with Xamarin, you have a few options.