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.
We say goodbye to our 2021 summer interns this week, and what a group of interns they were!
At SPS, Interns integrate with teams and take on projects, drive change, and improve process. In our students, we see the work they take on and the people they learn from, truly spark passion as they begin their career journey.
Technology interns not only learn coding practices, but they also learn about process that drive results.
SPS is a sponsor for TechNova and its First Global Women+ in Tech Hackathon event on August 24-29. We partner with University of Waterloo for our co-op students/interns in Canada and are excited to not only sponsor this event, but also to provide judges, mentors, and a glimpse into the life of a Technology career.
TechNova is a student-led organization aimed at creating a more gender-equitable future in technology. Our inaugural event is the University of Waterloo’s First Global Women+ in Tech Hackathon which aims to provide students with an end-to-end program to help accelerate their journeys in technology, wherever they might be!
GoMN is a “meetup” that gathers to discuss the Go programming language and its ecosystem. SPS became a sponsor in early 2020, offering our 8th floor meeting room. After a year and a half of meeting virtually, SPS is happy to welcome GoMN back to SPS Tower! If you’re interested in the Go programming language, come check out their event on August 18th!
Last month the SPS Technology department held TechJam - the yearly SPS technology community-led event. This event is completely volunteer-led by a group of individual within the organization. The team creates the agenda, selects external speakers, sources cool swag for the participants, leads a multi-day long Hackathon, and organizes fun happy hours for our various locations and timezones. For the second year in a row, the organizers managed a follow-the-sun agenda featuring speakers around the world and timezone handoffs between locations.
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.
