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. 🎉🏆
SPS Teach team members had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with Eric Ebner, CEO of Protocol 46 on the importance of Everyday security at a recent internal ‘Know More to be More’ (KMTBM) event. During the event Eric highlighted the heightened increase in new cyberattacks during the pandemic, stemming from remote work. He mentioned four main points that will improve our home and personal cybersecurity.
Social media companies collect their user’s information such as their location, associates and spending habits.
This week at SPS we are preparing for our “Happiest Hour with Jade Denson” co-hosted by the Black Business Resource Group and Women in Tech, two groups working to increase awareness and conversation related to diversity and inclusion. Jade Denson, VP of Talent Initiatives with MNTech will share how she is not only blazing a path for herself as a leader in technology but insights into what led to her current position, along with roadblocks and adversities she met (and fearlessly conquered) along the way.
As is custom for SPS, we participate in October National Cybersecurity Month. Each week during the month here at SPS is filled with a plethora of updated content which is distributed across multiple channels to reach every employee. Core concepts and emerging threats like ransomware are covered. New this year was an increased emphasis and focus on personal security.
As our traditional office perimeter has been swapped for the familiarity of home, the lines between ‘personal security’ and ‘best security practices at work’ has also dissolved.
– “the old ways of managing infrastructure aren’t just ineffective in cloud; they’re irrelevant.” (Stormant and Fuller, 3).
Think back to a time when provisioning a server meant waiting days, weeks, or even months for hardware to arrive, networking to be configured and base-level software to be installed. Nowadays, an engineer can whip up an image and plop it onto a Kubernetes cluster on the same day that they write their application code.
What do Girl Scouts, SPS Engineers, marshmallows, and sick dance moves have in common?
You will find them all at the Girl Scouts of the River Valleys “Think Like A Programmer with SPS Commerce” this weekend!
SPS Women in Tech (WiT) has partnered with GSRV to provide opportunities for girls in Kindergarten through 3rd grade to explore programming topics, and to get to know women working in STEM careers. We have been dancing, laughing, and learning together since 2019.
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 sixth in an eight-part series and will focus on the Trust scale in the Culture Map (task-based vs. relationship-based).
Cognitive Trust & Affective Trust Before we dive into the trust scale, it’s worth quickly touching on the difference between cognitive & affective trust, as these impact our understanding of the trust scale:
We have a lot of talents in #TeamSPS. Yesterday the Minneapolis Tech teams showed off some of those skills, from juggling, to photography at our Kubb Tournament. (You can read up on Kubb here.)
Kubb is a lawn game that has been enjoyed on the SPS lawn for years, and we were happy to be back in each other’s company for some sunshine and competition.
Teams arrived to the Turf Club at SPS Tower with anticipation of great tournament, and Jamie Thingelstad walked us through a Kubb overview.
SPS Commerce’s Travis Gosselin had the opportunity to join the Fail Faster Podcast this month, focusing on Elevating the Developers Experience. Travis has a strong focus within SPS Commerce in working towards experiences that developers love that they have to use day-to-day. Take a listen to the podcast as Travis walks through his career path and steps that SPS Commerce is taking to double-down on the developer experience for the long-term.
Feature Management Platform LaunchDarkly has been a core part of SPS Commerce’s approach to continuous delivery since the summer of 2017. The Fulfillment engineering team needed a way to deploy some code related to a new feature and control exactly who could see these changes. LaunchDarkly made that easy and when other teams within SPS saw what we were doing, the value was clear and it became a common part of applications at SPS.
