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Every year companies throughout Chicago compete to be named one of “Chicago’s Best and Brightest Companies to Work For®.” Only companies that distinguish themselves as having the most innovative and thoughtful human resources approach are bestowed this honor.

DragonSpears is thrilled to be named one of “Chicago’s Best and Brightest Companies to Work For®” for the third year in a row. “We constantly aim for progress, not perfection. I think our commitment to our core values and transparency helps us build a team that really takes ownership of all facets of the business and uniquely qualifies us for this honor time and again.” Patrick Emmons, Founder/CEO.

The principle “build once, deploy anywhere” is a fundamental part of Continuous Delivery and Deployment. If your underlying architecture is not built to support this behavior, you’re creating quite a few headaches for yourself and your Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. By following a few guidelines, you can ensure that the Artifact (the built code) you create is the same throughout each environment. In this article, we walk through a CI/CD pipeline deploying to AWS Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) that simplifies the deployment process and guarantees the “build once, deploy anywhere” principle is followed.

Design sprints are gaining popularity as an efficient way to investigate ideas and determine solutions for big problems facing small and large organizations alike. Using this methodology, a team of seven people can find a big challenge they need to tackle, identify a solution, build a prototype, and test it with real customers in just five days.

In this interview, Simon Hunt shares his experience as a design sprint facilitator. He has a background in software development and product management at Nokia, Microsoft, and BMW, and discusses how to put together a solid team, what roles people should play, and pitfalls to watch out for.

In this episode of the Innovation and the Digital Enterprise podcast, Randy Rivera stops by to chat with Pat & Shelli. Randy is a long time financial executive, entrepreneur and innovator in the emerging Fintech ecosystem. Randy gives his insights into the Chicago ecosystem, first as an executive then as an entrepreneur with keen advisors, the company he founded in 2018.

When applications slow or break, it can wreak havoc on your business. Imagine if your on-premises server went down, your Internet stopped suddenly, or your server room caught fire. Yikes! Developers need to be one step ahead of potential problems so they can quickly resolve any issues that arise or prevent them from happening in the first place.

One strategy that’s been a trending discussion is a cloud-native approach to application management. Here’s an example of how being cloud-native recently saved the day for one of our clients.