Women in Tech organized an event on August 1, 2023 for folks to network and learn from the external speaker Lisa Even. Lisa had a dynamic and interactive presentation about how to give productive and useful feedback. These are some of my key take-aways from the session:
Feedback Triggers: These are triggers that could make someone respond negatively to feedback. When giving feedback, we must be aware of these and respond appropriately.
Open source has become the de facto way to build software not only in tech, but across diverse industries. As companies use open source code to build their own commercial products and services, they also see the strategic value of contributing back to those projects. Since at least 2017 SPS has seen the benefits of contributing back to the open source community in ways large and small. Recently with the acceptance of Add ClientMetadata to SRP auth flow #90 to the aws-sdk-net-extensions-cognito repository another step has been made to contribute back to the community and share additional features out to all consumers of this extension.
SPS Commerce is excited to partner with and sponsor the University of Minnesota Chapter of SWE (Society of Women Engineers) for the Fall 2022 – Spring 2023 school year!
Throughout the year, there will be multiple opportunities for SPS to get involved and support SWE’s mission to empower women to achieve full potential in careers as engineers and leaders, expand the image of the engineering and technology professions as a positive force in improving the quality of life, and demonstrate the value of diversity and inclusion.
My Journey to Becoming an SPS Intern (+Tips and Tricks) This post is the first part of a series in which we explore the journey to becoming an SPS Intern along with Melissa Wood, 2022 Summer Technology Learning Services Intern at SPS Commerce.
Post 1: Applying
When I was applying for internships last fall, there was a lot about the process that I was unaware of. I thought it would be easy and that I would land a role quickly (boy, was I wrong).
Autumn is my favorite season in Minnesota. Something about the cooler temps and crisp air, the leaves changing color and falling from the trees, giving the air a familiar smell, and a crunch underfoot when heading out for a brisk walk. One of my favorite things about October in particular is that it is the home to Hacktoberfest, an event that encourages everyone to participate in open-source! Whether you’re a veteran programmer, or brand new to coding, Hacktoberfest offers a great opportunity to connect with open-source projects you know and use, explore new projects, add new features or enhancements, squash bugs, fix typos, clarify documentation, or draw that diagram that really helps a project community understand what the project’s goals are!
With the release of our REST API Standards, SPS Commerce is committed to continually evolving our Developer Experience through APIs and beyond. Join SPS Commerce and the folks at Tyk.io, on the All About APIs Podcast by Tyk as we dive into Developer Experience and API-led product growth.
Ways to listen: - Apple Podcasts - Spotify - Stitcher
Episode #002 - SPS Commerce’s Travis Gosselin talks DevEx-powered API-led product growth
Real people and real pizza, what a combo! Join us in person or virtually for “Observing Golang: OpenTelemetry from Code to Prod”, presented by Roni Dover, CTO and Co-Founder at Digma.
GoMN Meetup, September 21, 6pm CDT at SPS Tower We also provide a virtual option, via Zoom, for those uncomfortable attending in-person.
Meetup Registration Here!
SPS Application Engineer Charlotte Countryman shared her experience as a judge for the TechNova Hackathon! SPS Commerce was proud to team up to support the student organizers from the University of Waterloo with their second Women+ in Tech Hackathon. Read about the two projects that stood out the most to her over here.
The SPS Commerce Tech Team has been working tirelessly over the past few years in curating a single set of technology best practices that we call Guardrails. These Guardrails are the culmination of years of experience from our engineering teams in designing, building, implementing, deploying, and operating best-of-breed software on the world’s largest retail network. These Guardrails consist of high-level technology decisions such as Language and Framework selection or DevOps Practices and drive all the way into expectations around Secret Management and Environments.
Recently, I joined the first hackathon, aka innovation project, of my life. The hackathon was part of our internal Tech Jam conference at SPS, where we work on solving challenges, exploring ideas, learning new things, building, and sharing our wins and findings with the entire tech team to close out the conference. I had always hesitated to be part of a hackathon event. I thought this was only for software engineers, programmers, coders, and developers.
Each year SPS Technologists participate in a volunteer-led internal tech conference, called TechJam. Read more about a few past TechJams from 2020 & 2021! 🎉 Our team of 27+ volunteers did everything to get TechJam up and running this year: from hosting Zoom prep sessions to crafting NFTs, from running a CFP process to source talks to creating our awesome logos. As the week wraps up, we wanted to share more about the process of TechJam.
Stoplight recently made available a free ebook resource titled The API Roadmap: Secrets to API Strategy Success from Industry Leaders. This is an amazing resource that pulls together the information and insights from the series of API Intersection podcasts that have taken place over the last year and beyond. If you are building or starting an API-First initiative or program this is a MUST read!
SPS Commerce had the opportunity to join the API Intersection podcast a few months back and share our journey so far into API-First culture.
At SPS Commerce we are moving all our APIs into Kubernetes. There are many reasons for this change, but one of the more fun reasons is the ability to use a tool like Jaeger. Jaeger is a distributed tracing tool, useful for seeing how your APIs and services all work together to process one request.
A lot of the initial setup of this infrastructure was performed by our wonderful SRE team.
SPS WiT is proud to announce a new steering committee! Thank you to outgoing members, Annie Greenawalt and Megan Tischler for their leadership. It has been exciting to see your passion shine during your time in this role. Congratulations and welcome to the next generation of leaders! We can’t wait to see what you bring to the team.
This Wednesday, May 18, at 6:00 pm, the GoMN Meetup is welcoming John Murphy who will present Debugging Go Programs in Kubernetes. A brief summary of the topic can be found here, where you can also register to attend!
The event is sponsored by SPS Commerce, is BOTH in-person AND virtual, and everyone is welcome to join - this is a free event :).
If you have ever gone browsing for some great conferences for software engineers, you likely have come across No Fluff Just Stuff, aka NFJS. NFJS offers a network of conferences and webinar topics, both big and small concentrating on anything software developer and architecture focused. They offer content weekly in the form of both free webinars and full-day workshops across a variety of topics. Content is delivered by experienced architects and engineers with first-hand expertise in the topical area.
In the course of investigating an issue with a multi-region deployment in AWS EKS, I ran into not just some obscure behavior from the application operating in the second region, but just straight-up bugs in the AWS SDK for .NET itself. Investigating further across other SDKs in different ecosystems and there are interesting behaviors for region configuration across them all; both good and bad.
Problem It started on the first deployment of a standard .
This Wednesday, April 20, at 6:00 pm, the GoMN Meetup is welcoming Raj Auradkar who will present Dependency Injection and Mock-Based Testing. A brief summary of the topic can be found here, where you can also register to attend!
The event is sponsored by SPS Commerce, is BOTH in-person AND virtual, and everyone is welcome to join - this is a free event :).
SPS Commerce will participate in the MNtech Job and Opportunities Fair at The Machine Shop on Thursday, March 24th, 2022, at 530pm. Please, stop by our booth; we will be happy to make new friends and answer all your questions regarding our thriving technology business!
The event is free, with free food and drink! Click here to register!
Hope to see you there 😊
SPS Commerce is moving fast in adopting an API-First culture and mindset, as we re-envision our API Platform from the ground up. Some amazing work from our internal tech community and engineering teams over the last year. Dive in and check out our journey so far in the latest API Intersection podcast as we chat about API Style Guides and Developer Experience.
Shout out to the API Intersection Podcast team over at Stoplight who are producing fantastic content on a regular basis, that we have used to help guide our direction at SPS.
SPS Commerce is a “booming” technology and SaaS-based organization to work for. Like any enterprise that has consistently done double-digit growth for the last 20-years (I say that like there are a lot… but not as many as you might think), the technology and development-based initiatives on the rise make for an interesting eco-system of tooling that a developer navigates on any given day. That tooling can also be wildly different across different teams and departments.
Our interns are the coolest bunch around, and we are looking forward to meeting the next round of incredible minds for our 2022 program. (Seriously, read about our team from last year and you will see! Goodbye Summer Interns)
TeamSPS is hiring 11 interns for our summer 2022 internship program. You will work as part of our larger technology team of over 300 people around the globe. SPS internships are paid.
My husband, Joe, wanted to buy a tractor for over five years to use at our cabin to grade the mile-long road we maintain and to do other important and cool stuff that he assures me can only be done with a tractor. For over five years, he has researched, planned, and hunted for that perfect used tractor with low hours of use, at a price he liked. My only requirement was it had to be a John Deere…just because.
Recently, I was invited to join a panel of customers for an event called “Launch and Learn.” It was a dual-purpose event that included marketing for LaunchDarkly and also questions from their engineers about how customers use their products. SPS is a long-time LaunchDarkly customer and jumped at the opportunity to help them out in this way.
If you want to hear more about how SPS uses LaunchDarkly to flag our new features and continually release code, here’s the video of that event:
Two of our Software Engineers from our Minneapolis office, Ana Knickerbocker (find her on Twitter too!) & Jenna Truong took part in a hackathon in October through Hack the Gap. We asked them to share a little about the hackathon and what they did. They were on a team of 4 individuals and their project ended up winning, aligning nicely with the SPS Value of Win Today, Win Tomorrow. 🎉🏆
