Coffee is a staple at any office. From coffee pots, to Keurigs, to cold brew, there are many ways to make coffee readily available to team members. But if you’re passionate about high quality coffee, how do you make that available without training your employees to become baristas? …

As a software company, we’re always improving our products, and we apply this same mentality to our perks & benefits—iterating over time to continually improve them. And because we’ve open sourced our employee handbook, this evolution is fully transparent! As part of this continual improvement, in March of 2022, we…

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…