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 third in an eight-part series and will focus on the Persuading scale in the Culture Map (inductive vs. deductive persuasion).
Some of this content is either directly taken from, or is a summary of, Chapter 3 of The Culture Map, with my own examples and perspective added for clarity.
Cultivating gratitude can be a difficult task, especially in a year like 2020. As we reflect on the past year and look forward to the new one, it’s only appropriate to celebrate and express our gratitude for two team members who have been with us for 20 years. We celebrated each of them at our annual company meeting in November, and want to congratulate them on their journeys here as well.
On December 22, we hosted our first annual SPS Tech Holiday Concert! Ten team members shared their musical talents in an hour-long event over Zoom for all of us to enjoy. The idea started with one team and then grew to include all of tech because we realized that there are so many technologists who are also musicians.
This fun concert included holiday pieces performed on the violin, mandolin, cello, piano, trumpet, flute, theremin, and a couple of vocal performances as well.
Hark how the bells,
sweet silver bells,
all seem to say,
throw cares away
Christmas is here…
Christmas is coming and again we hear Christmas songs and carols everywhere. Many people remember “Carol of the Bells” from their childhood but not many people are aware of the origin of the tune. Being a global company, with a large tech presence in Kyiv, Ukraine, we have a little bit of insight to share here :) The song “Carol of the Bells” actually originated in Ukraine.
When designing a software system one of the fundamental questions we need to answer is “where will this software run?”. At SPS Commerce we have chosen AWS as our cloud provider which helps lead us to the answer of this question, but the AWS choice does not answer every question. In most scenarios we will run our software in a Docker container on one of our EKS or ECS clusters. However, in some scenarios, we may need to run directly on EC2 instance or may need to run workloads in one of our data centers due to licensing or cost concerns.
The SPS WiT (Women in Technology) group provided the opportunity for our teams to have early access to documentary Coded Bias and participate in a discussion together. Eyes were opened and we are committed to continuing the conversation regarding our own experiences with bias, and making sure we are paying attention to our unintentional contributions in these areas too.
SPS Commerce’s Assortment product has recently undergone an effort to modernize our Java environment. After living in Java8 for a number of years, last year we took on the sizeable effort to jump past the recent major JVM refactorings to Java13. This was a challenging task requiring a large amount of dependency chasing and testing of our entire product both in build and at runtime. After letting those changes prove out for a while in production, this year we took the next leap to be truly current with Java15.
Cyber Week is historically the most important week for TeamSPS, and during this time we give special attention to our systems and customers while executing on a hypercare playbook. Working remotely this year brought forth some extra challenges in execution. The following are few ways we were able to adapt our hypercare playbook to accommodate our team being fully remote.
Hypercare lounge is open. Using Zoom, we recreated the in-office feel by keeping a channel open at all times for the team to gather.
December 3rd at 5:30PM ET our Software Engineering & Cloud Meetup is excited to have Michael Gold, SPS Lead Software Engineer, share techniques for domain modelling. Please make plans to join us!
Dan Juckniess, Sales SVP , dropped into one of our team stand-ups today to provide his support and encouragement. We love seeing our partners across SPS showing up to share the love with the team as we ramp up Cyberweek. We are feeling all the SPS Value feels: Succeed Together, Get After It, and Win Today, Win Tomorrow! 🙌
I’m here. I am here as a Black Gay man at SPS. I am here to support and encourage other People of Color and LGBTQIA people to speak up, earn, and demand your place at the table. I am here to help make a change and help myself and SPS grow. I am here to encourage Black, LGBTQIA, and People of Color to understand their worth and not to shy away from it.
Our most recent Tech All Hands, presented as a live radio show, included a cameo from “DJ Thingles,” team and individual recognition, snapshots from our home offices, and commercials for our 2021 plans. We continue to find innovative ways to deliver and this meeting was a delivery full of excitement for what the next year will bring!
In fourth grade I helped start Green Girls Robotics, an all-girls FIRST Lego League team out of Eagan, MN. I created this team because I wanted everyone on it to explore their interests in science and technology regardless of the gender norms and stereotypes that existed even in a fourth grade classroom. As we grew up through the FIRST robotics programs my teammates and I became interested in securing opportunities for the underrepresented groups in STEM including females, People Of Color, children in the foster care system, students with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ persons.
My love for technology predates my time at SPS and ironically the dream of someday being a Software Engineer or contributing to tech driven solutions wasn’t one I felt was within reach but for the supportive community and mentors that helped guide my path.
I wasn’t your typical “A” student, not the best best at math (you know, all the things you tell yourself to convince you not to try) and even when I could summon the courage to take on the challenge, I didn’t know where to begin.
Today our SPS teams pause and get a chance to come together as 1 TeamSPS at our Growth Summit to reflect on the year and look forward to our plans for 2021. It’s been a wild 2020 across the world, and we are so grateful to stop, look around and take in all the wins, and appreciate our TeamSPS.
Having been a part of a service team for the last couple of years and being responsible for several evolving products with most of them being legacy for the team doesn’t make a developer’s life easy. Sometimes without changes in the everyday routine, the team can end up 100% loaded with the support of current projects without any ability to innovate. We almost faced this issue about a year ago and decided that we needed to do something about it.
Since its introduction to the TECH teams about eighteen months ago, Team Agile Maturity Measurement or TAMM, has become, de facto, an important practice along with regular retrospectives that our teams are using for continuous improvement of their Agile software development process.
Quite a few teams are already familiar with the approach and have made a huge progress in utilizing the TAMM but there are those that have just started recently.
Tomorrow night! QuintessenceAnx, a Developer Advocate from Pager Duty is talking problem-solving, normalizing minorities in Tech, and being a better ally. Check it out: Unquantified Serendipity: Diversity in Development #meetup #inclusionmatters
Working on a team that is globally distributed is a great experience which also presents opportunities for deeper analysis and understanding. Since SPS is a multi-national, and thus multi-cultural, company, I will be writing eight individual blog posts which follow the eight scales of cultures outlined in Erin Meyer’s book, The Culture Map. For my Minnesotan and Canadian colleagues, don’t run away after reading this, but this post will focus on how different cultures provide negative feedback (coined Evaluating in The Culture Map).
For the last 15 years, I’ve been part of teams that either focus on or maintain legacy software. I’ve been a part of teams that have had their legacy teams slow down the pace of innovation and get in the way of delighting our customers. However, I’ve also been a part of a team that managed their technical debt and continually evolved the product to maintain market competitiveness. Both of those projects were monoliths with major annual releases with patches to support it throughout the year.
Here at SPS Tech, we have various Guilds that have been formed by our team members. Guilds are a self-organizing group of people with common interests. It is a natural forum for social interactions that build relationships that, in turn, promote cooperation, cohesion, and productivity. Our engineers, testers, and other staff use Guilds to learn, share, grow, and sometimes, just to have fun together with people sharing common interests.
Just some of the guilds at SPS Tech:
Yesterday we reconnected with old friends and met some new ones at our event “Secrets of Tech: How to Interview Like a Badass” presented by the SPS Women in Technology group.
During this virtual event, representatives from our human resources, technology, and intern recruiting teams provided a behind-the-scenes look at what happens throughout the interview process including the technical evaluation process. The goal was to help intern and early-career candidates learn how to bring their best self to the table!
Hi, everyone! I’m Randi. I’m the acting HR Business Partner for Technology (my other job is in recruiting, but I’m engaged in this temporary assignment for a bit).
I’m here. I’m here as someone who cares about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. I’m here because I believe people are at their best when they can express themselves and be heard. I’m here because I believe that many of us need to get better about having authentic conversations.
Like many companies, we are still predominantly in a Work from Home state, but SPS has put in many precautions and safety measures to allow team members to work from the office safely if they desire to do so (only in areas where it is considered safe to do so). One of our team members was in the Minneapolis office recently and shared these images. Before Covid-19 required us all to move our work to our home ‘offices’, this area was known as the “Creation Station” where team members could come together for a break from work to do some coloring, word games, play Battleship, or most often, work on a puzzle together.
I’m going to assume that you already buy into the advantages of unit testing your code and the merits of doing so don’t need to be enumerated in yet another article. Perhaps more interesting and unique in today’s software development practices is the idea of unit testing your architecture!
Architecture itself has MANY definitions and may mean something slightly different to each person (i.e. “the hard stuff”). In this context, when I refer to unit testing architecture, I mean to refer to the common expectations and contracts of what modules or projects are allowed to reference and use.
Today I realized that, at twenty years old, I have spent nearly half of my life in FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics .
Every Monday, Friday, and Sunday of my high school career you could find me sitting in a shop writing code and building robots. For at least nine hours a week I collaborated with my team Green Girls Robotics to get ready for competitions and outreach events.
Another shining star intern from our first ever virtual internship program, Shravya Gade, shared her knowledge with our teams at a recent Tech Meetup. In this video clip, “Managing Metadata in a Distributed Workspace” Software Engineering Intern Shravya explains the fine line between trustful systems and utter chaos.
Good communication is intentional, and the rewards for putting in the work often outweigh the planned outcome. For the past year we have been publishing a bi-weekly email newsletter that had the unintended outcome of helping us all feel a little more connected to each other as we moved our work to our homes. Happy Birthday to Tech Tuesday; thanks for helping us stay informed and connected.
Working on a team that is globally distributed is a great experience which also presents opportunities for deeper analysis and understanding. Since SPS is a multi-national, and thus multi-cultural, company, I will be writing eight individual blog posts over the coming months which follow the eight scales of cultures outlined in Erin Meyer’s book, The Culture Map. This post will cover the Communication scale of The Culture Map.
Much of this content is either directly taken from, or is a summary of, Chapter 1 of The Culture Map, with some examples added for clarity.
Our very own Tim Van Cleave shares his experience being a CodeDay Labs mentor during the Coronavirus Pandemic. Check out his blog article published on the CodeDay blog space, Finding Your Place in Technology with CodeDay Labs.
“I’m Here” is a new initiative that SPS Technology is launching to strengthen our culture, improve diversity, and become a more inclusive organization. We will feature “I’m Here” stories to share experiences and perspectives from volunteers across our teams. I’m excited to share my story to kick off the initative.
I’m here. I’m here as a woman in tech. I’m here supporting other women in tech. And, I’m here to inspire young girls to find interest in tech.
Missing the quality coffee and conversation in the break room, but still finding ways to stay connected over our virtual coffee catchups!
Kasun Mayadunne
If you have or plan on doing anything constructive with your log output from a default ASP.NET Core Web Application you have probably come quickly to the conclusion that the default logging leaves a lot to be desired. Just take a look at it:
Request starting HTTP/1.1 GET [test.com/v1/Test/C...](http://test.com/v1/Test/CheckConnectivity) Executing endpoint 'Test.Web.api.v1.TestController.CheckConnectivity (TestApi.Web)' Route matched with {action = "CheckConnectivity", controller = "Test"}. Executing controller action with signature System.Threading.Tasks.Task1Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc. ActionResult1TestApi.
Grace Hansen was a returning summer intern who first joined SPS as an Aspirations in Computing intern in 2018. She is now headed off to her Sophomore at the University of Minnesota and finished out her internship this summer with a presentation at our monthly Tech Meetup. Enjoy watching and learning from Grace with How SPS Gave Me the Opportunity to Study Trees.
Ah, it’s System Demo day, again. Get up early, handle the flurry of activity getting the kids ready, and hop on the first of, often times, four back-to-back, hour-long calls. It may seem like a lot of overhead, but the reality is that System Demos are exciting and generate energy far more than they take it away. The Delivery Teams show the work they’ve done and tie it to the Business Cases we’re focused on during this Program Increment (PI).
SPS Commerce is headquartered in Minneapolis, MN and we have technology teams that span the globe in the following locations: Minneapolis, MN (USA), Little Falls, NJ (USA), Toronto, Ontario (CAN), Kyiv, Ukraine, and Melbourne, VIC (Australia) along with contracted teams in additional locations (India, Bulgaria, Mexico).
These team members are a blend of interns, part-time employees, full-time employees, and contracted team members. Some teams here work entirely within their local office, some have team members that span across a couple of locations and others span numerous geographic locations.
SPS Commerce is partnering with NDC Minnesota 2020. The online developers conference is offering high quality workshops led by experts in the software industry. For example, who could better teach .NET Core than Scott Hunter himself? Check the amazing line up of speakers. The online event is scheduled from Tuesday 9/8/2020 through Friday 9/11/2020.
After a long Labor Day weekend, and until NDC comes back to an in-person format, don’t miss this unique online event focused on hands-on workshops.
I am so grateful that SPS Commerce believes in the future of Women in Technology, and is demonstrating that support by sending 17 SPS women from the Technology team to the first ever virtual Grace Hopper Celebration. I can’t wait to share this experience with my teammates and learn from attendees around the globe later this month! Megan Tischler
SPS Tech Summit Challenge SPS Tech Summit and SPS Tech Jam are two tech events organized by SPS Commerce annually. These events allow SPS employees to gain new knowledge as well as share their knowledge with others on different technology topics. This year, the organizers have decided to host a competition named “The AWS DeepRacer Challenge”, which runs in parallel to the above two events.
SPS employees can team up, learn about AWS DeepRacer and Machine Learning and work together for the glory.
The joke is that there are two hard problems in Computer Science, and the one that I find myself trying to solve far too often is the problem of Naming Things. If you really want to know the other (or others, depending on how clever you are) you’ll have to keep reading (or hop over to Google quick, here’s a link: “naming things”). In the meantime, let’s focus on how to completely side-step this issue so we can get on with our day.
The post below was originally written in late March as we were initially beset by (not the first) wave of 2020 chaos when COVID began getting diagnosed in the US and public life began to grind to a halt. In reading it again I found myself encouraged again to make the most of my current work-emstance. Hopefully the content has aged well for you too and you can continue to make the most out of your remote work.
SPS hosted 13 virtual interns over the summer, and we wanted to share their reflections as the summer draws to an end. Here is Breanne Pundsack, Software Engineer Intern, and MN Aspirations in Computing Awardee.
I have had such a wonderful experience being a Software Engineer Intern this summer at SPS. I was able to work on a team that primarily builds tools for other internal teams. I worked on two of those tools this summer: Pointdexter and Trinity.
No matter what language or package manager, dependency management in most projects suffer from many of the same problems: - Evaluating incoming security risks associated with packages in your project never really happens. - Latest dependencies are added when a project starts, and not updated very often after. - When upgrades of packages do occur it is typically a big bang upgrade of everything causing more effort and testing than you would have hoped.
I find myself reflecting more than usual, which I attribute to recent events: The continued local Minneapolis, USA-wide, and global protests against racial inequality and institutionalized racism, The July 4th US holiday weekend celebrating the independence of USA as a county, in contrast to Juneteenth celebrating independence for all persons, Numerous companies, including SPS, replacing terms with racial etymology such as ‘master,’ ‘slave,’ ‘whitelist,’ and ‘blacklist,’ or completely changing or replacing brands and many more such as “teaching” our children remotely highlighting challenges with access to necessary tools and our education gap, the extreme polarization of politics and civil unrest, protests, Black Lives Matter, the list goes on…)
This past month, the SPS Desktop Engineering team started deploying a Cloud Management Gateway (CMG) to over 800 laptops. This will allow SPS managed laptops to receive policy updates and patching without having to manually connect to the VPN, something that can be cumbersome for emloyees to remember to do everyday. While the CMG is not meant to be a full replacement for the VPN, it helps create a more “remote-friendly”, secure environment.
How has your team approached remote work? How have you approached remote work? I’d be curious to learn more about how folks are managing these challenging times, now that we are a few months in.
My team has been handling it very well. We’ve welcomed a new engineer and intern, both who are learning and growing just as we’d expect in the office. The team has managed to stay connecting through: All-day Zoom hangout room.
We recently completed migrating some of our loader containers from Mesos to ECS. During this process, the team reduced the size of the containers and the number of running containers to help reduce operating costs. This optimization was possible by watching the actual memory usage in Grafana under real production workload, which wasn’t possible in the old Mesos environment. Only one other process in Mesos remains for migration!
Who says you can’t have a team outing during quarantine / social isolation? I just had a great time connecting with my Melbourne, AUS team members through a virtual “team outing”. We successfully worked our way through The Midnight Express escape room! Luckily, we made it to the end, and with 0 hints :)
Jon Beattie
I know that it might sound a bit pretentious but I believe that SPS values #know-more-to-be-more and #give-back are the most powerful drivers that connect SPS Commerce as an organization and as SPS employees with the society we live in. Not only the various charity initiatives that SPS conducts year after year, but also educational programs for the younger generations and knowledge sharing at professional conferences and events is what makes SPS recognizable within local communities.
Dare to Disrupt was the theme this year for Tech Jam, the yearly conference organized by the SPS Commerce technology organization. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic brought some unexpected “disruptions” but did not shake our goal to hold a successful and safe online conference on 7/8-9/2020. Our Tech Jam event included 48 speakers, from 4 countries, across 3 different tracks, over 2 days. In addition to a great line up of SPS internal speakers, we had the privilege to welcome three amazing external contributors: Laura Madsen, Chief Executive Guru of Via Gurus, Casey Rosenthal, CEO of Verica, and Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer.
Certain AWS components (and cloud components in general) do amazing jobs at simplifying our lives as developers who just want their infrastructure to be there. I can have a first-class layer 7 load balancer ready to use in my application within seconds. On the flip side, when abstracted technology is so readily available to you it might at the time seem indistinguishable from magic! AWS ALBs may fall into this category for you.
The SPS Commerce Technology Team has kicked off the third year of the summer internship program by hiring 13 interns. We have integrated the interns into 13 different teams across Technology for a summer full of solving real problems. Three of these interns are from Aspirations in Computing who’s mission is to revolutionize the face of computing through inclusion. The remaining ten interns are from University of Minnesota, Macalester College, Gustavus Adolphus College, and Rochester Institute of Technology.
Last week ART2 officially launched, and to quote Curtis Hebbard-Langille, WE CRUSHED IT! We celebrated two days of successufl PI Planning with virtual highfives and an ART2 happy hour.
Welcome to the SPS Commerce Technology Team site. We will be using this site for #TeamSPS to share learnings, exciting wins, and things that we find interesting. Expect to see items from our annual Tech Jam and Tech Summit events, in addition to updates from our global offices in Kyiv, Toronto, Melbourne, Little Falls and others!