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.
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.
Liquibase is one of those technologies that I knew the name of at SPS Commerce well before I ever had cause to use it in my day-to-day work. For the unfamiliar, Liquibase is an application that interprets files and converts them to SQL. We use it at SPS Commerce to deploy and rollback changes to our databases. It was a bit of a mystery before I joined the database team, but for my team it is an invaluable tool.
Guilds are a self-organizing group of people with common interests. It is a natural forum for social interactions that build relationships which promote cooperation, cohesion, and productivity. Guilds provide a horizontal communication layer across our Technology teams on a wide variety of topics.
Our analysts, engineers, managers, and other staff use them to learn, share, grow, and to promote education through experiential learning. This collective action benefits the guild members, their craft, and our organization.
April 1st @ 5:30 join us in this SPS Commerce sponsored meetup! Andy Sciro will be presenting his talk, Javascript: The aggregation of marginal gains over time. The talk’s details are as follows: After the birth of my first child, I went through a period where I began to question many aspects in my life such as my goals, my career, and the skills I value as a Software Developer.
Dependabot native has been around for a couple of years now after GitHub officially acquired it in 2019. But if I google “Dependabot” I still generally find myself at the “Dependabot.com” home-page, and up until last week found myself still using the Dependabot-Preview. In general, the difference between preview and native is a little confusing.
We introduced Dependabot-Preview into the mainstream organization at SPS Commerce as part of our standard development processes near the beginning of 2020.
Picture this: it’s 2007. A very wealthy prince desperately wants to gift you a portion of his inheritance. But you (heartless you) ignore him, moving his email to your spam folder. Fast forward a couple of years, and the prince has changed. Our prince goes by a new name now, maybe Microsoft Outlook, Dropbox, or perhaps your very own employer. This time our ‘friend’ has no fortune to give, but your data is still on his mind.
When companies recognize the need to scale their team-based agility methodologies it’s easy to forget that the same principles that apply to growing its business apply to how it gets that work done. This may sound obvious but it’s still an easy trap to fall into that an out-of-the-box framework will solve all ways of working challenges. This would be like saying that all a successful startup needs to get off the ground is a great idea.
I’m Here.
As a three-time software engineer intern at SPS Commerce, I’ve had the unique opportunity of experiencing three unique relationships with my embodied identity and SPS’s culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion as both have evolved over the past few years. That first summer, I was here navigating the inbetweens of emerging adulthood and a new professional environment at the same time as I was questioning if and how I could occupy this space as a queer person.
Our very own Andre Burgaud recently published an article with Real Python sharing a tutorial on how to leverage Brython for web development (that’s right, Python in your browser!). Check out his article for a very in-depth analysis and tutorial! Brython: Python in Your Browser
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 fourth in an eight-part series and will focus on the Leadership scale in the Culture Map (egalitarian vs. hierarchical).
Power Distance & Leading In the 1970s Geert Hofstede coined the term “power distance”, which refers to the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.
The organizers of PyCascades put on an amazing remote event for the 2021 edition. Over the last 12 months, conference leaders have adapted to the situation and demonstrated their agility. PyCascades was no exception. The main day event was on Saturday 2/20/2021 and was flawless. The conference plaftorm was conducive to a pleasant remote conference with everything at the attendees’ fingertips: interactive track, recorded track, chat with the speakers and attendees, help, code of conduct, and more.
Yesterday we closed out our 2021 Tech Summit event. As discussed in our last post, the Tech Summit is an event where we intentionally set our ‘day jobs’ aside to learn more about the strategic vision of our entire technology organization for the coming year. Over these past four days, we have covered some serious ground with some major topics. Each day had its own focus, outlined below:
This event included four General (‘Keynote’) Sessions along with nearly 20 Breakout Sessions!
I believe the workplace culture is to SPS what our personalities are to us. It’s what makes us unique. Our unique culture is derived from the operationalization of our values and the people who live them. The Tech teams at SPS and the culture that surrounds us comprises a community for me. We are heterogeneous and inclusive, share common values and beliefs and have common objectives. We are empathetic and desire the best outcomes for one another.
Far too often when issues arise within our teams, we default to blaming the current methodology or tools we are using and propose a new process or tool to use instead. Many times, after another process or tool change, our teams are still dealing with the same issues. This is when, I suggest, that we all take a step back and ask ourselves “why” (_I recommend using the 5 Whys - Root Cause Analysis_).
Consider this: When people all think the same way, they rarely challenge each other to think outside the box. Companies often have programs to encourage innovation and out-of-the-box thinking. It is safe to assume that most companies are looking to innovate, grow in market share and grow in revenue.
To achieve imaginative, creative ideas, companies in the tech industry are more likely to achieve these goals if they are working with people from many different backgrounds.
Tonight 2/17/2021, at 6:00 pm, the GoMN Meetup is welcoming Peter O’Neil who will present Debugging Go Services in Kubernetes with Skaffold and Telepresence.
The event sponsored by SPS Commerce is virtual and everyone is welcome to join.
Photo by KiVEN Zhao on Unsplash It’s incredible to think that the LANDMARK Javascript release es6 was over 6 years ago (See the official release here)! Javascript and its community have learned a lot since that time. One point of criticism was how HUGE the es6 release was and how difficult it was to learn EVERYTHING. With that said, ES2021 adds a nice digestible set of awesome features coming to your browser soon :) Here are my favorite things being added!
I’m feeling exhilarated, recharged, and inspired after attending the Scrum Alliance panel sessions last week, observing the #AgileManifesto20thAnniversary. The free virtual conference was an excellent opportunity to learn, connect with the Agile community across the globe, reflect on how much has changed since the Agile Manifesto was written, and dream about what our future holds.
There were 3 panel sessions throughout the day that focused on the past, present, and future of Agile.
Our very own Travis Gosselin presented at the DevOps Underground London online meetup last month! Check out his presentation on “Feature Flags & Scaling with Microservices”:
I’m here first and foremost in my home. And that’s not just because we’ve all been working from home since mid-March, 2020. First and foremost in life, I’m a husband and a father. I have an almost 7-year-old daughter, a nearly 4-year-old son & a 9-month-old daughter. Like any other parent, I want to see the best possible future for all of my children. It’s not an option for me to continue to propagate privilege solely to other white males like myself.
SPS Comemerce kicked off our Black History month activities today by hosting an event for our global teams. After a compelling presentation from Dr. Yohuru Williams, we broke off into small groups to work through discussion questions.
Many of the small groups were led by our Tech leaders, who helped drive conversation around personal “I will” statements, and the commitment we all are making to dismantling systemic racism. Small groups shared how they will turn their awareness and understanding into action.
AWS Account Granularity The growth of SPS Commerce has continued to be very strong, even amidst the recent global pandemic, as we work to provide an enabler for essential services. The demand for SPS services and products continues to grow and our architectural patterns additionally must continue to mature alongside of that demand growth. Like many organizations that started with a smaller footprint in the cloud that experienced exponential growth, part of our growing pain stems from the boundaries of our AWS Account structure.
In development, we often focus the majority of our time on answering the question “how does this application need to function” and spend a little less time on the questions “how am I going to test this” or “how can I be sure this application is working”. Better yet, how often have do we ask the question “how will this application react when it experiences some type of failure”? We know that failure is inevitable – so how do we mitigate the effects and ensure our application can function as intended?
SPS WiT (Women in Tech) sent members of our Technology team to join the other 30,000 attendees at the virtual Grace Hopper Celebration in 2020. This group took their experience one step further by sharing back what they learned with the rest of our teams at a recent Meetup.
Takeaways were shared on these key topics from talks attended at GHC:
Transform your code reviews (Macy Buan) Testing growing pains (Madeline Finnerty) Accessible technology (Jessica Lee) Advances in AI (Charlotte Countryman) The group also shared many significant learnings regarding the future impact of Technology on:
It’s that PI planning time of year again. We race to wrap up our releases - deploy…deploy…fix the dependency…does it work? We try to wrap up our planning before we start planning despite the fact that we will never be 100% planned. We reflect on what we’ve accomplished and celebrate as if just to set up the question, “how could it have been better?” As many of us in Tech just underwent this quarterly exercise, it is a great opportunity to refresh why we do it and how we can lean in.
Maddie Sandish was a three time returning intern this past summer, participating in our first-ever All-Virtual internship program. Since then, Maddie has stayed on with the team as a part-time engineer, all the while attending Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, MN.
They shared with teams last fall at one of our internal Tech Meetups about a topic that not only resonated with our teams but also opened a door to greater understanding.
The first Program Increment Planning event of 2021 is wrapping up. Teams spent this week joining together (virtually) to work through planning, identify dependencies, and align on goals. Well done everyone! It’s incredible to watch so many of our teams come together. #GetAfterIt #SucceedTogether
The Cloud Computing and Software Engineering Meetup has its next online event on Thursday January 14th @ 5:30PM EST. This month we are excited to welcome Adam Gordon Bell from Earthly and the CoRecursive Podcast to speak to us about how Earthly can help improve our CI and build processes.