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. ...
SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif., Aug. 12, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- SPK and Associates, LLC (SPK) is excited to announce our recent award as one of 2019's 501 most elite Information Technology managed service providers in the United States. The Channel Futures /...
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...
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...
Deploying modern software applications is a complex process involving many moving parts. Adding microservices into the mix amplifies this problem by further decentralizing applications, resulting in more deployment endpoints to track. With all those IP addresses...
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...
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...
The servers that I’m managing can be divided into two groups, colo and local servers. While most of the configuration has been similar between these two, there have been a growing number of things which I’ve had to configure differently through Puppet. The latest...
Recently, I was working on a custom API program for a customer, when I came across something that could be a sticky little problem for someone trying to add custom API programs to their PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager Environment. The problem was first manifested...
Recently, a customer came to me because they wanted to record when changes were promoted from their development environment to their test environment, and later from their test environment to their production environment. They wanted a way to simply tell when changes...
Redundant and repetitive tasks present a number of challenges for your business. Your engineering team feels bored, like they’re wasting their time. Pretty soon, they’re done being bored and looking for more challenging and rewarding work. With skilled engineers in...
Recently I explained how to easily set up communication between a Puppet client and master. In this follow up post I’ll outline the steps involved in configuring the Puppet master to control the client machine. Starting out with Puppet does not have to be a...
