On July 8, 2016 the employees, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends and children of Jama gathered to celebrate another great year at the annual Jama Birthday Party. (Check out the 8th, 7th, 6th and 5th celebrations!) A summer rain pushed us inside, but our soon-to-be-sub-leased 1st floor made the perfect open space for the bouncy house, face painting and general merriment, hoopla and celebration (by adults and kiddos alike!).
At Jama we value and embrace the whole person, and what better way to celebrate another great year of work together than with great food, great fun and great company.
Cheers to the people of Jama, to the people who support us and to the work we do!
We use the hashtag #lifeatjama a lot around here. The fact is that we love to celebrate our culture and how we work & play together. It’s not a marketing ploy, it is a reflection of our values and approach, our way of life here at Jama software.
A few months ago, the Engineering and Product teams were talking about a team building activities that we could do as a group to further our working relationship. One of the suggestions was a camping trip together. We reserved a group site at Timothy Lake in the Mt Hood National Forest and all came together the last weekend in June.
We spent the weekend camping as a group with our coworkers, our families and pets. We were hiking, fishing, we hung out at the camp fire and cooked meals together, and roasted S’mores. We played with a hand made set of Kubb, created with this trip in mind. It was an awesome weekend of celebration and togetherness as a team, as well as one on one.
I’ve worked in the technology field in Portland for nearly 20 years and I have to say that I have never experienced a culture at a Company where I have spent multiple days and nights outside of work with coworkers and not only enjoyed every moment of it but I was disappointed when the weekend came to a close. The fact that many of us were talking about doing this again soon as non-company event speaks to the awesome people I have the pleasure of working with every day.
#lifeatjama is very real. Life is good here!
A few weeks ago I had a friend Grace reach out to me and ask me if I could speak to my experience with the DevOps movement from an engineering management perspective. Grace is one of the organizers of the Portland DevOps Groundup meetup group. Their goal is to educate others and discuss topics having to do with DevOps. I agreed to speak as well as host the event at Jama (one of the very cool things that we do as an organization is to host such community events).
Grace asking me to speak was timely as I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about the culture of DevOps and how it is applied here at Jama.
The term DevOps did not use to be widely known, now it has become a fairly common term. With that wide adoption also comes misuse and misunderstanding. People are using the term for all sorts of things as well as it being buzzword for catchall job titles. To me, DevOps is all about collaboration, communication and integration. I titled my talk “DevOps is dead, long live DevOps” on purpose to gain a reaction from people (which I definitely did get reactions from some of the recruiters in attendance). My point in picking that title was that the term has become diluted and misused and is becoming irrelevant.
I focused my talk on my personal history in software development coming from an operations background. I’m no expert, this was just me sharing my experiences as a manager of technical people and how I’ve tried to build highly collaborative teams that enjoy working together and solving tough problems. I really enjoyed being able to share three separate work experiences with a large group of people and discuss how I’ve learned from each job and applied those learnings in an effort to improve upon the process each time. I spoke at length to my most current experience here at Jama and how we are working as a group to better integrate the practices and principals of DevOps into all of engineering instead of it being a single team called “DevOps” that is tasked with the work. This cultural shift is starting to happen and that is a good thing for all of Jama engineering.
I spoke for the better part of an hour and received some really thoughtful questions at the end of the talk around how people can work to affect change in culture and gain business adoption of these practices. DevOps in some ways is still mysterious for people or they think of it only in terms of tools and technologies, my hope is that my talk made it less of a mystery and starting more people thinking in terms of collaboration, communication and integration across the company culture.
ACT-W, a conference to advance the careers of technical womenconvened in Portland for the fourth year on April 23 & 24. The conference scheduled included workshops (Women in Tech: the Past, Present & Future; Easy Web Applications with React & Redux; Level Up as a Leader), panel discussions and a job fair with mock interviews. Several Jama employees attended the conference, Customer Support Manager Megan Bigelow spoke on a panel, Jama hosted the conference kick-off happy hour and we attended the job fair.
This was Jama’s first year of sponsorship for ACT-W and we kicked off the weekend by co-hosting a happy hour with Jive Software.Huge thanks to Guardian Gamesand Red Castle Games for loaning 200+ board games for the event! (And a big thanks to the Portland spring weather, which held off on raining so we could enjoy the patio!)
Kristina King, Jama’s Support Community Manager and conference attendee had high praise for the event, “This was my first timing attending an ACT-W conference, and I’ll definitely be back. Two experiences stick out for me. The first keynote, delivered by Grace Andrews, was about finding your “authentic voice,” and it was captivating and inspiring. Grace weaved in her personal story about trusting herself and her skills while encouraging the audience to speak their truth. It is too common to have a comment like “but you’re so pretty” or “women don’t have coding minds” weigh us down and cause us to doubt ourselves and our path. It was invigorating to be reminded to listen to ourselves and help others find their own voices. Secondly, I attended a workshop to create an LED lantern with Arduino. Not only did I learn how to solder in this class, but I also did some coding and uploaded it to an Arduino trinket to make a light change color. I’m not a programmer, but this class gave me a little taste of what it entails and left me empowered to try new things. Overall, I would suggest anyone working in tech, or thinking about working in tech, attend this conference. (Particularly if they are a woman or identify outside of the gender binary.) It was overwhelmingly positive and drove valuable introspection for me.”
Senior QA Engineer, Hang Dao, (who spoke on our own panel last year at a Women Who Code event at Jama) was excited to see the growth of the event and increased energy among women in tech in Portland. Her favorite session was the React/Redux workshop with Folashade Okunubi and was encouraged to see so many other local companies employing the technologies used at Jama.
Megan, a member of the Portland tech community for the last 16 years, and Co-Founder and President of PDX Women in Tech, spoke on the Women in Tech Community Leaders Panel. “It was an honor to share the stage with such brilliant and active women in tech leaders. The candid conversation amongst the panelists acknowledged the hardships we’ve faced, while highlighting the good. The most rewarding experience was seeing (and feeling) the support of the hundreds of conference-goers while we were speaking. ACT-W does a fantastic job of bringing resources, learning and connections to women in an effort to support their technical careers — a critical asset to our community.”
The conference wrapped up with a Career Fair and mock interview sessions. Several Jamanian’s were on hand to share insights into life at Jama, as well as talk with candidates interested in our open positions. The full room of attendees was promising, as Portland continues to crusade for more gender diversity (as well as diversity of all kinds) in it’s tech community. “Chicktech’s ACT-W career fair was one of the most energizing I’ve been to in awhile. The quality of conversation with the attendees, their passion and enthusiasm for technology was inspiring,” said Lauren Espinosa, Jama’s Manager of Talent.
We were honored to be a part of such a fun and impactful event — thank you to ChickTech, ACT-W and all of the conference attendees for making such a great event possible. ACT-’s mission to help women professionals network, grow their skills, and discover employers looking for exceptional talent is something we were proud to be a part of.
It’s been an exciting year of growth for Jama, evidenced by close to doubling of employees this year. One of the ways we initiate our new employees is through Orange Week, a quarterly orientation. What started as pizza in a conference room has evolved into a three-day Jama University. During Orange Week, new employees are hosted in a nearby offsite location, where they get a crash course in the history of the company and get to know each department.
Orange Week Q3 2013 included coffee and a lesson in the history of Jama with CEO Eric, a mini-seminar with employee #4 Steve, titled “What are Requirements?” and a very informative round of Two Truths and A Lie with Colleen, our Director of Finance and Operations. Also on the agenda were presentations detailing the inner workings of each department, a hands-on Jama training and a sprinkling of informative and borderline-cheesy-but-still-funny icebreakers for the 15 new recruits.
The lasting impact of Orange Week is the class gift. The spirit of Orange Week and the personality of each class shows through with the selection and purchase of a gift. In the early days at Jama, we had a grocery fund called the $440 Fund (pronounced “four-forty”). (When we did the math originally – X number of employees multiplied by X dollars per month—the total was $420, but for obvious reasons we didn’t want to have a fund called the four-twenty fund…so we added $20 and ergo, the four-forty fund was born). Each month a different employee was given $440 and put in charge of groceries for the company for the month. This meant that some months we had a nice mix of fresh fruit, granola and yogurt in the kitchen, and other months we had cases of Cup-a-Noodle and Kirkland brand GORP. One favorite was the month that someone stopped at a local bakery each morning and brought in fresh-baked, still warm artisan bread and butter.
We long ago outgrew a monthly grocery allowance of $440, but wanted to keep the legacy of the $440 fund at Jama, so fast-forward to present day. Orange Week class is given $440 to purchase a gift for the company. Past gifts include potted plants to warm up our brand-new office, a bike repair and cleaning station, framed photographs of our customers and the work they do and a commissioned oil painting of an astronaut planting a Jama flag on the moon. Each gift has represented not only the unique character of each Orange Week group, but is representative of a point in Jama history. Plus, we’ve allowed new employees to contribute to the shaping (and decoration) of their workplace. I can’t wait to see what our Q3 2013 class comes up with!
Be sure to check back on our careers page regularly to see what positions are open.
