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.
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.
