Where are YOU boldly going?

Originally posted on the Blackstone Forge blog by Bill Brooks

To boldly go where no one has gone before!

– Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek Next Generation

In both the original series of Star Trek and the Next Generation a core part of the mission involved discovery, to “boldly go.” However, before they could ever boldly go anywhere, the unsung heroes performed mountains of designing, engineering, and testing.

At Blackstone we try to enable our employees to boldly go. To facilitate this brave era of discovery and exploration we leverage an internal sandbox environment for all employees. Our sandbox, part of our Blackstone Labs capabilities, is known by the codename: Project Beach Party. While Cloud services are an important part of our Blackstone Labs, Beach Party was created as a safe space for our team members to experiment and try new things without risk, fear of incurring a hosting bill, or breaking anything. It also provides us an opportunity to test our own private and public cloud; development, test and production environment management strategies; DevSecOps practices; and Continuous Integration, Testing and Delivery capabilities while encouraging cross-team collaboration.

Beach Party currently hosts everything from:

• Our prototype and development environments for solutions like Cloudia;
• Rapid access development environments;
• Test environments for our transformation and compliance offerings, to
• Internet of coffee usage statistics, and
• Our ever-helpful slack robots.

We also have people using Beach Party to test out plugins and configurations for Jira, Confluence and other Atlassian tools. Additionally our people use it to learn new software that they’re not familiar with, Docker and Ansible for example. People are all using Beach Party to Boldly Go in their own directions, seeking out new… stuff!

There are a lot of different ways to set up your own testing environments. At Blackstone we have Beach Party and our more formal AWS and Azure environments. These allow for us to have an “Encouraged to Fail” culture. However you should also check out the free trial offerings that are available from the likes of Amazon and others. There are also several different options for use on your own laptop or personal computer; VirtualBox and VMWare come immediately to mind. So break out your flip flops and towel and get your feet wet! Where are you Boldly Going?

Launched in Arlington, Virginia in 2002, Blackstone Federal is the beltway’s premier engineering, transformation, and creative design agency. Rooted in a common culture, Blackstone Federal employees bridge the gap between the beltway and Silicon Valley to create a company unlike any in DC.

Learn more about Blackstone Federal at blackstonefederal.com .