When it comes to IT solutions, most mid-market manufacturing companies rely on one of two options. They have a dedicated in-house IT team, or an outsourced IT managed services provider (MSP). But manufacturing companies who care about product development and...
Engineering Operations
Problems that Engineers in Regulated Industries Face
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og6826J7EOo Video Transcript: I'm Carlos Almeida, VP of Engineering at SPK and Associates. I've spent most of my professional life doing software engineering. 25 years plus in the world of high tech in the electronic design automation...
Engineering Inefficiency is the Enemy of Innovation
I was intrigued by the information and conclusions presented in OnShape’s recent report, “The State of Product Development and Hardware Design 2019.” However, I was not as surprised as they were to hear that the biggest problem in R&D is still complex processes,...
Improve your build/test/deployment with CloudBees CD (formerly Electric Cloud Flow)
Repeatability is an intuitive aspect of daily life. If you throw a ball up, it comes down. If you throw it up twenty times, the same thing will happen, up and then down twenty times. When repeatability doesn’t occur and it’s supposed to, we get anxious. ...
Flexible Continuous Integration Pipelines With CD
What is a Continuous Integration Pipeline? The purpose of a continuous integration pipeline is to allow teams to constantly integrate and build software updates in order to quicken release cycles, lower costs, and reduce risks. In a simple implementation of a...
SPK Wins 2020 Managed Service Provider Award
We are thrilled to announce that SPK and Associates won the Channel Futures / Channel Partners 2020 Managed Service Provider (MSP) 501 Award for a second consecutive year! This prestigious award is widely viewed as the most comprehensive global survey of Information...
How AWS Became the Favorite of Engineering
AWS, with its commanding market share in the world of cloud, relies heavily on engineering organizations for its success. We’ve explored the reasons for this in previous articles. What it boils down to is that Amazon’s cloud platform is more geared toward the way...
Combining AWS and Azure for Optimal Cloud Performance
We’ve hinted at it throughout this series, but now we’re going to say it explicitly: To get the most out of the cloud you should be combining solutions. At the very least, you should be thinking more flexibly than “AWS is for engineering, Azure is for IT.” Does Your...
How To: Move Git Commits From One Branch to Another
Git encourages developers to use branches during their development process as a means of coordinating and managing changes to the master branch. Git does not force any particular strategy for doing so and consequently, several popular branching strategies have...
Blog Series: A Deep Dive into the Agile Manifesto’s 12 Core Principles
In this 12-part series we will examine 12 underlying principles behind the Agile Manifesto, starting with principle number 1: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Let's break this statement down...
A Primer on How Hybrid Cloud Can Turbo Charge Your Manufacturing Enterprise
Private cloud-based solutions are scheduled to surpass traditional data centers by the year 2020. But your manufacturing organization shouldn’t wait until the end of the decade to start its cloud migration. Chances are good that your outdated infrastructure is in...
Three Monotonous Tasks That Are Killing Morale In Your Software Engineering Team
In the engineering world, there’s no underestimating how hard it is to attract and retain top talent. Finding qualified candidates is hard enough. But you want to go one better than that. You want to attract talent that gives your organization a competitive edge. Once...