SPS Application Engineer Charlotte Countryman shared her experience as a judge for the TechNova Hackathon! SPS Commerce was proud to team up to support the student organizers from the University of Waterloo with their second Women+ in Tech Hackathon. Read about the two projects that stood out the most to her over here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.