This article is part of our XPRT Magazine #12. You can read the complete magazine here. Or read the .pdf version of this article.
At Xpirit, we believe every company is an IT company, no matter what product or service it provides. Today, no company can make, deliver, or market its product efficiently without IT technology. Whether it is banks, insurance companies, logistics companies, or retailers, IT and software are critical to their success. Many companies embrace this fact and are insourcing software developers to be better, faster, and cheaper. They understand when they adopt new technology and implement it successfully, they gain a stronger foothold on the market. Companies that wait for a second or third wave stay at the back of the pack and will have a very hard time becoming a leader in their market.
Since our start in 2014, this is the premise we have worked from. Helping companies to become an IT company. We have always done that by leveraging the potential and knowledge of our people., each one from within their own area of expertise. And together, we drive change at customers by introducing concepts that are part of an Engineering Culture.
And this change is pursued in multiple areas because we believe you cannot be successful if you focus on 1 area alone. It is not enough to write good software, build a great cloud foundation, have a nice workplace, or automate everything. It is everything, together, that will make you great. Not only in the development teams but also at the leadership level.
We call this combined set of capabilities and behaviors a company should have “an Engineering Culture”. To be an IT company, you need to act and behave like an IT company. And everything we do as Xpirit adds to this vision. This Engineering Culture can be seen from many different perspectives that we categorize in a number of distinct pillars that together will help you become successful and can be used to drive change.
One of the pillars is “State of the art software engineering”. In this magazine, we talk about the latest innovation in software development and the Azure cloud platform and talk about the use of IoT, Azure Container Apps, and Web Assembly.
We also cover the “ops” side of development. Although Infrastructure as Code is already becoming the new normal, there is still a lot to be discovered and learned about it. In this edition, we will cover Bicep and ARM and how these can help you to speed up your delivery of infrastructure in the cloud.
Another pillar is “Smooth Delivery”. This has been our bread and butter since we started Xpirit. This is crucial to be successful as an IT company and therefore part of an Engineering Culture. We talk about the development toolchain and supply chain, that has become the heartbeat of product delivery, and an attack vector if you look at security. We also explore how you can lower the barrier of entry in a product development team with the use of Codespaces, which is introduced by GitHub as a means to improve the developer experience. As an early adopter, we worked with this technology for quite a while and we can share what we have learned so you can speed your adoption of this new feature..
With the increase of automation and the fact cybercriminals are adopting the cloud and DevOps practices faster than the average enterprise, we see an increase in the number of threads we need to deal with as an industry. Business Continuity, Reliability, and Security is essential. We cover these topics in our Engineering Culture pillar “Appropriate continuity”. We want to be “secure and compliant by default”, while increasing your speed of delivery and the stability of the products you deliver. In this magazine, you’ll find an article that can help you prepare for a security assessment and we introduce you to the concept of Chaos Engineering to validate all the hypotheses you make during the development of your applications and infrastructure.
The fourth pillar we’ll touch upon in this magazine is “Epic Work Environment”. Does your culture match your ambition to become an IT company? DevOps is all about People, Processes, and Tools, so we also cover a lot of the cultural aspects that come with becoming an IT company. A new approach to knowledge sharing and a learning mindset. Because every profession changes over time. Including ours.
This magazine is a reflection of the wide spread of knowledge that is present at Xpirit. We love to share our knowledge throughout this magazine and this is also part of our own internal Engineering Culture under a fifth pillar “Knowledge Driven”. You might already have seen that we are expanding in Europe. We introduce Xpirit Germany which will help drive change at companies in Germany, and we broadened our capabilities into the IoT business.
Last but not least, you can read about how platforms can help you to accelerate your business. You can read about how the implementation of a self-service cloud portal helped Maersk to effectively respond to the log4j vulnerability, and we talk a bit about how you can use the Azure IoT platform and how to migrate your AKS workloads to Azure Container Apps. These articles are part of the sixth pillar “Power Through Platforms”.
We hope you enjoy this magazine and would like to challenge you to take a step back and look at your own company. Are you an IT company? And what do you need to build your own Engineering Culture?
Let’s talk about Engineering Culture. Get in touch for a pressure-free chat.