Big shout-out to Charlotte Countryman and Tim Olson for representing Team SPS Tech at DevOps Days, Minneapolis, discussing some of the internal tech community happenings at SPS. As mentioned in a prior post, we’ve been perennial sponsors of this event, as we see this organization as one that regularly invests in local Technology community building and maturing in our location. If you’re at DevOps Days in person, stop by to say hello to any one of our team members, on site!
Will we see you at DevOps Days Minneapolis later this month?
SPS is once again sponsoring Minneapolis’ DevOpsDays event. We’ve been perennial sponsors as we see this organization as one that regularly invests in local Technology community building and maturing in our location. DevOpsDays gives voice to a diverse pool of talented engineers and elevates the need to communicate, break down silos, share pain and embrace opportunities to learn. Within the speaking track, there is a blend of cultural and technical talks that can range significantly.
.NET Core with runtime secrets has been a bit of a journey within the AWS ecosystem over the past 5 years. At SPS< our journey of onboarding and shifting our entire infrastructure from on-premise into AWS Cloud started in 2016. Along the way, we have sought to continuously improve secret management as our systems and technology are ever-evolving. And I’m here to say, secret management and usage that you can be proud of is much easier and much simpler using .
This Wednesday, June 16, at 6:00 pm, the GoMN Meetup is welcoming SPS’s own Andre Burgaud who will present httpexpect - End-to-end HTTP and REST API testing for Go. A brief summary of the topic can be found below:
httpexpect is a concise, declarative, and easy to use end-to-end HTTP and REST API testing for Go (golang).
Basically, httpexpect is a set of chainable builders for HTTP requests and assertions for HTTP responses and payload, on top of net/http and several utility packages.
The 2021 SPS Summer Internship program started this week! We have 18 interns in Minneapolis this summer that are working in Technology, Finance, Human Resources, and Marketing. Our interns come from diverse backgrounds, and are all going to be embedded with teams in the Minneapolis office.
Some cool intern facts
-14 of our 18 interns this summer are in our Technology Business Unit.
-Tech has hosted interns for many years and has had the largest number of students each year since our official program started in 2016.
The LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group at SPS, with support of Executive Sponsor Lynn Myhran and in collaboration with our HR/Marketing teams, is hosting the first official Pride Month at SPS this year! It is with great excitement that we are able to focus on the history of our community, the intersectionality of identities, and hear from voices of current LGBTQ+ employees!
Pride month is a time to celebrate the joyous lives we live and remember how far LGBTQ+ rights have come.
SPS Commerce was a Platinum Sponsor for Open Source North this year, which took place on Thursday, May 20th. A crew from SPS, including Scott Brons, Megan Tischler, Cory Fleming, and Andre Burgaud shared what has made our Tech Community pratice successful.
The SPS Tech Community is a self organizing group of individual contributors and managers across the entire technology organization at SPS Commerce. We receive support and financial backing from executive leadership.
We are currently preparing for our annual internal conference, Tech Jam! Each year, we have a multi-day event with a mixture of internal and external speakers to share, demo and generally help us to grow as a tech org. This is always one of our best times of year and an event that everyone looks forward to attending. Over the years, there’s been a great mixture of presenters across tech teams, across various levels of experience and also with varying levels of technical depth vs.
It’s Professional Development Week at SPS! This means we are able to take some time to pepper in great sessions to help each of us to intentionally grow and develop amidst everything else we’re doing to build amazing products and solutions. This week brings amazing talks about Listening Skills, Cultivating Curiousity, Resilience, Career Coaching, Mindfulness, and manager tracks with even more content. Teams across SPS are welcoming the opportunity to learn and grow together and it’s great to be able to do this along with our peers across other departments.
Amplifying partner events is one way that TeamSPS lives out our value of Give Back. We are proud supporters of the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing program and will welcome our MNAiC summer interns to the Minneapolis team at the beginning of June. This event is one more offering from the MN Tech community to support future technologists. We can’t wait to see these students solve some big problems!
Bright Ideas Hackathon is an online event for women in Minnesota’s high schools and 2021 graduates.
Today, I’m going to continue my Growing Your Cultural Awareness in Business series, drawing on learnings from Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map. This post is the fifth in an eight-part series and will focus on the Decision Making scale in the Culture Map (top-down vs. consensus-based).
The Deciding Scale: Top-down vs. Consensus-Based Top-Down Decision-Making: Decisions are made by individuals (usually the boss). Consensus-Based Decision-Making: Decisions are made in groups through unanimous agreement.
In 2019, I sat wide-eyed in a presentation hall at KubeCon in San Diego. There I mustered all of my self-restraint to keep myself from leaping off my chair and yelling “Yes! I have seen this bug! And today I know I am not crazy!”
In “The Gotchas of Zero-Downtime Traffic With Kubernetes,” Leigh Capili of Weaveworks gave an excellent presentation on some unexpected network issues in Kubernetes and their not-so-obvious solutions.
A few weeks ago, we told you about our SPS Guilds. The Open-Source Guild (OSG) was formed in 2020 with a two-fold goal of responsible Open Source Software (OSS) usage and giving back to the community through open source contribution and creation. Early on we realized this as a very large goal that we should drive toward this goal in an iterative fashion. As a group, we decided to initially focus on giving back to the tech community through OSS creation.
Hello, I’m here to listen and to amplify those with seldom heard voices. I’m here to acknowledge my privilege but will use it to lift those around me.
A couple of years ago, I attended a MinneBar session on hiring. In that session, they talked about diversity in a way that stuck with me. When thinking about diversity, think about the voices that are missing from your team. I talked a little about this at our internal conference, TechJam, two years ago.
Are you or someone who know looking to break into the tech industry? Or maybe you’re looking for some tips to help your current job search. You should make plans to join us Thursday, May 6th at 5:30 PM ET!
In this meetup we’ll discuss how to break into your first role in the tech industry. Topics to be discussed include networking, effective resume writing, and personal branding. Come prepared to ask your burning career search questions.
On Friday, March 13th, 2020, I headed out to the 1029 in Northeast Minneapolis with my coworkers for what would (unknowingly) be our last Friday lunch outing of the year. I sat belly-up to the bar with a secret I had just shared with my manager (@Sonja Peterson) that morning – I was 8 weeks pregnant. As I sipped my water and listened to my friends chat about the coronavirus that was taking hold in the United States, I knew I wouldn’t be returning to work on Monday.
Background During the academic year of 2020-2021, North Hennepin Community College is piloting a new program for women who are ‘one of few’ in the fields of Computer Science, Construction Management, and Pre-Engineering, and Criminal Justice:
Be Bold Break the Mold: NHCC Women Succeed in Nontraditional Career Fields
Be Bold – Break the Mold’s Mission is to support women students who have made a conscious choice to enter a career field that is challenging, engaging, in-demand/high wage, and not typical for their gender.
Liquibase is one of those technologies that I knew the name of at SPS Commerce well before I ever had cause to use it in my day-to-day work. For the unfamiliar, Liquibase is an application that interprets files and converts them to SQL. We use it at SPS Commerce to deploy and rollback changes to our databases. It was a bit of a mystery before I joined the database team, but for my team it is an invaluable tool.
Guilds are a self-organizing group of people with common interests. It is a natural forum for social interactions that build relationships which promote cooperation, cohesion, and productivity. Guilds provide a horizontal communication layer across our Technology teams on a wide variety of topics.
Our analysts, engineers, managers, and other staff use them to learn, share, grow, and to promote education through experiential learning. This collective action benefits the guild members, their craft, and our organization.
April 1st @ 5:30 join us in this SPS Commerce sponsored meetup! Andy Sciro will be presenting his talk, Javascript: The aggregation of marginal gains over time. The talk’s details are as follows: After the birth of my first child, I went through a period where I began to question many aspects in my life such as my goals, my career, and the skills I value as a Software Developer.
Dependabot native has been around for a couple of years now after GitHub officially acquired it in 2019. But if I google “Dependabot” I still generally find myself at the “Dependabot.com” home-page, and up until last week found myself still using the Dependabot-Preview. In general, the difference between preview and native is a little confusing.
We introduced Dependabot-Preview into the mainstream organization at SPS Commerce as part of our standard development processes near the beginning of 2020.
Picture this: it’s 2007. A very wealthy prince desperately wants to gift you a portion of his inheritance. But you (heartless you) ignore him, moving his email to your spam folder. Fast forward a couple of years, and the prince has changed. Our prince goes by a new name now, maybe Microsoft Outlook, Dropbox, or perhaps your very own employer. This time our ‘friend’ has no fortune to give, but your data is still on his mind.
When companies recognize the need to scale their team-based agility methodologies it’s easy to forget that the same principles that apply to growing its business apply to how it gets that work done. This may sound obvious but it’s still an easy trap to fall into that an out-of-the-box framework will solve all ways of working challenges. This would be like saying that all a successful startup needs to get off the ground is a great idea.
I’m Here.
As a three-time software engineer intern at SPS Commerce, I’ve had the unique opportunity of experiencing three unique relationships with my embodied identity and SPS’s culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion as both have evolved over the past few years. That first summer, I was here navigating the inbetweens of emerging adulthood and a new professional environment at the same time as I was questioning if and how I could occupy this space as a queer person.
Our very own Andre Burgaud recently published an article with Real Python sharing a tutorial on how to leverage Brython for web development (that’s right, Python in your browser!). Check out his article for a very in-depth analysis and tutorial! Brython: Python in Your Browser
