In recent years, interest in engineering design automation across multiple industries skyrocketed, especially due to the high return on investment (ROI). Relieving your engineers from tedious, error-prone tasks and directing them toward automation presents a fantastic...
Engineering Operations
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...
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...
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. ...
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,...
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 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...
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...
How Engineers Used Twitter During SolidWorks World 2018
Last week, SolidWorks held its annual conference, SolidWorks World 2018, in Los Angeles where over 5,000 engineers, manufacturers, educators and enthusiasts attended. Many who could not attend streamed the conference sessions online and scanned the 5000+ tweets that...
Our Top Technology Stories in 2017 and 2018 Industry Predictions
SPK wants to wish our growing subscriber community a Happy New Year! We’re honored to be welcomed onto your desktops and smartphones to share stories on how to make your engineering team and company work more efficiently. Perhaps more importantly, we hope any...
Five Hybrid Cloud Implementation Pitfalls an SMB can Avoid
You likely know your company's IT infrastructure must be upgraded soon. However, you may be avoiding it due to perceived cost or difficulty. The good news is that you don’t have to make large capital expenditures to expand and update your IT infrastructure. Hybrid...
How Automation Helps Reach Target Product Launch Dates and Increases Engineer Morale
Automation isn’t just for manufacturing tasks. In fact, many of the grinding, repetitive tasks your engineers can’t stand can easily be automated out of existence. Any task that is repeatable is automatable. That means you can save big money on man hours, letting your...