One of our primary goals with HQ v2, which we moved into over the summer, was to provide an office environment that supports our team’s best work—something that can only be accomplished if that work is free from sudden interruptions! That’s why we knew from the early days of designing…

Transparency is one of my core goals for the Sparksuite family. We took a big leap toward that end when we publicly published our employee handbook over two years ago. Today, we’re taking another large step in that direction by releasing our open salary calculator. Let’s take a dive into…

Today marks exactly a decade since I began professionally crafting software. Back then, Sparksuite was “Next Step Webs” and it designed websites for local small businesses. Here’s a not-so-flattering screenshot of its very first company website, circa 2009:

Today, we released a new paid time off policy at Sparksuite, replacing a set of policies that had been in place for about a year. …

As it stands, there’s little-to-no information online on how to use SSD persistent disks on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). Seems odd, given the simple nature of this task. This post aims to fix that. Google offers two main types of persistent disks, which are provisioned automatically for persistent volumes on…

As with any continuous integration and deployment platform, speed is crucial for developer efficiency. Recently we took our CI jobs and refactored them to ensure they were as fast as possible. Here’s how you can do the same: 1. Host your own GitLab runner GitLab.com (GitLab’s hosted SaaS offering) provides shared runners for repositories to use…

Although headquartered in The Woodlands (near Houston), Sparksuite aims to be one of the leading software companies in Texas. That requires attracting the very best talent and competing with job markets like Austin and Dallas (and to some degree, nationally). To that end, we’ve decided to follow several other tech…

Last month, Google released the much needed ability to move Google Analytics properties between accounts. Why is this useful? Given that Google Analytics is now over 10 years old, the organization of your Google accounts may be a bit different than it was in when you first started using the…

For several years now, the app development company I own has maintained GradePro, a grade reporting tool for K-12 students. Without going into specifics, the app generates a fair amount of revenue through Apple’s iAd program. …