The Ship It Podcast

Heard a lot about AI and Machine Learning but don’t understand it?  This month’s episode is for you: we’re introducing machine learning in the simplest way possible, as if we were chatting with a five-year-old!  
Special guest Tyler Renelle, host of Dept's Machine Learning Guide podcast, sits down with with Dept Engineer and Resident Five Year Old, Matt Merrill to teach him about the history, background and technical landscape of machine learning. Just enough to get anyone, even an actual five-year-old, started!

Happy new year! We’re kicking off 2022 with one of the strongest themes of 2021: NFTs and cryptocurrency. Last year these took the world by storm, with “NFT” even being named the Word of the Year! 
In this episode of Ship It, host Keegan Sands revisits a Dept Talk in which we explore this breakthrough year and ask ourselves, what’s next for crypto? Some of the highlights of this conversation include the different use cases of NFTs for brands, the value of one blockchain platform over another, compliancy conundrums, and expert predictions of what the near-ish future will look like. 
 
Featured on this episode we have some exciting blockchain-savvy folks: David Markley of Algorand, Joao Reginatto of Circle, Anne Marie Gianutsos of The Drone Racing League, Abdel Boazzati of Coca Cola, and Jesse Streb & Brandon Aaskov of Dept.

Shipitio is entering a new dimension with an episode all about 3D! And here to talk about their 3D experiences are a few folks from Dept, Rocket’s parent agency: Jake Rainis, Matt van Voorst, Rachel Caires and Richard Thompson.
Together with host Keegan Sands, they’re sharing their expert opinions on how 3D Experiences can enhance products as well as the technical challenges of implementing 3D in the browser. 
As usual we end with our picks:
Keegan - Marcus Eder's Ultimate Ski Run Matt - Bruno Simon his twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/bruno_simon_devRachel - Luna Display deviceRick - Dog Studio and Lusion  Jake - RealLifeLore
Enjoy!

Shipit.io is back! In this episode Rocket founder Jesse Streb and Rocket Director of Engineering Matt Merrill dive deep into scaling teams.  We cover "team smells", how DevOps is key to scaling teams and other topics related to making sure your software team grows healthily. Enjoy our round-up of picks at the end and don't forget to round off this episode with our recently published scaling teams blog post and eBook!

Episode 10 continues our "Origin Stories" series where we interview senior engineers about their careers in software. This time around, host Keegan Sands (Full Stack Developer, Rocket Insights) interviews Tiffany Pereira, Rocket Insights' QA Practice Lead.  Tiffany studied Computer Science to be a software developer, then did a QA internship and really loved it. Even after that internship, she viewed QA as a steppingstone to be a developer, but over time she found that by embracing the parts of QA that many people overlook, that she could develop her talents into a career path that she loved.Tiffany and Keegan touch on the "dream" of automation testing, the investment necessary to get there and why automation might not be a panacea.  They also dive deep into the importance of why QA can be so much more than just writing test cases and why it's so important to have an open dialogue between QA and Developers.
Picks:
Tiffany - Diagnosis on Netflix
Keegan - For All Mankind on Apple TV+
 

Episode 9 continues our "Origin Stories" series where we interview senior engineers about their careers in software. This time around, we're interviewing Brian Manning, Principal Software Engineer at Rocket Insights. Brian started out digitizing football playbooks and wound up getting hooked on coding, becoming an Android developer in a series of startups and even starting his own company. He talks about the importance of knowing what you don't know and how, with enough work and persistence, anyone can be a developer.
Picks:
Brian - "Die" by Kieron Gillen (Graphic Novel)
Brandon - Fortune Feimster: Sweet & Salty Netflix Special

Episode 8 is the first in a series we're calling "Origin Stories."  We'll interview a senior developer about how they got into the field of Software Development and the lessons they learned along the way.  We hope you find these stories interesting and that they might offer you guidance if you're figuring out your own place in the world of software development!
Our first Origin Story is with Matt Merrill, Principal Software Engineer at Rocket Insights.  Matt started as a Computer Science major in college but ended up switching to a different major. Theoretical programming just wasn't interesting to him.  But, in his second year out working in the real world, found himself doing some stuff that made him realize that programming business applications was a lot different than the theoretical stuff he knew from school. It  didn't take long for Matt to fall back in love with programming and make it a career. Over the course of his roundabout journey, Matt learned a couple important lessons. Don't let yourself get too comfortable in what you do and, above all, always ask yourself why you're building what you're building.
This is our first quarantine episode recorded remotely at home.  Enjoy and stay healthy out there!
Picks from the End of the Episode:
Matt - Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
Brandon - Darknet Diaries Podcast - XBox Underground Part 1 & Part 2 
 

Rocket developers Brandon Aaskov, Dave Oelfke, Simon Ingeson, and Matt Merrill dive into the topic of clean code. When is it worth it? When is it unnecessary? Will it get you in trouble with your teammates? We also share some practical tips for walking the line between "You ain't gonna need it" and when it's worth it to spend that extra 20 minutes cleaning up code.  This podcast was inspired by the article "Goodbye Clean Code" by Dan Abramov which ignited a lot of talk in the Rocket Insights engineering slack channels!
Detailed Notes:
00:00 - Intros
03:20 - Human readability is the most important thing. Are there any hard and fast rules? Cyclomatic complexity is a fancy word that's discussed
06:00 - It's hard to break out of a bad abstraction. It's hard to predict the future
11:00 - There's nothing more permanent than temporary
12:15 - Spreading out your code over lots of folders is probably not a great idea
14:30 - Flexing your muscles... Unnecessarily?
15:26 - A word from our sponsor
16:30 - Wait for the pain
19:30 - Give yourself flexibility for the future, but don't implement it right away
20:40 - How did we get to this point? A little history. Memory management wasn't always done for us
27:00 - There are no hard and fast rules. Be an adult
29:45 - The golden hour rule. Readme's are important
37:45 - Back to what makes code readable
41:00 - Testability. Using tests to learn about existing codebases
45:00 - File driven development
46:30 - Why refactor?
51:15 - The good samaritan rule
51:50 - Picks:
Matt - HBO Silicon Valley Season Six
Simon - 1917 (the movie) 
Dave - Nest.js
Brandon - Master Class 

In episode 6, Rocket Insights developers Brandon Aaskov, Scott O'Brien, Adam Fraser and Matt Merrill take a deep dive into Single Page Applications (SPA's): How did we end up with SPA's over Server Side Rendered (SSR) apps?  What problems do SPA's solve?  When should and shouldn't SPA's be created? They explore the idea that perhaps developers create SPA's because it's fun, but we forget about user experience.  The phrase "Postmodern Hellscape" is uttered.  They also explore a solution that might provide the best of SPA's and Server Side Rendering (spoiler alert: it's next.js/nuxt.js)!
Detailed Discussion Topics:
0:00:00 - Intros & Background of SPA's - From AJAX to Electron.  Some personal history.
0:05:40 - Flash and Flex were the original SPA's! How did we end up at SPA's from Server Side Rendering?
0:11:15 - What problems do SPA's solve?  UI's are hard to make user-friendly.  CSS and HTML limit us compared to Native apps.
0:20:15 - Are we prioritizing developer experience over user experience?
0:22:00 - When should you use a SPA? Feel is important. Consumer facing vs. non-consumer facing applications.
0:27:30 - When shouldn't you use a SPA?
0:32:00 - Developers are spoiled! Resume Driven Development/Hype Driven Development.
0:43:00 - Why are you building what you're building?
0:48:00 - Routing is important. Should you be doing routing in the client at all?
0:52:00 - Next.js / Nuxt.js - The best of both worlds?
0:58:50 - A lightweight server might be the best answer.
1:00:00 - The difference between replicating your database on the frontend and UI specific state on the client
1:03:00 - Wrappin' it up.
1:04:00 - Picks!
Brandon - The Oculus Quest
Matt - 20khz Podcast
Adam - Vizhub
Scott - Lighthouse 

Happy new year! In Episode 5, host Brandon Aaskov, Rocket Insights founder Jesse Streb and Rocket software developers Dave Oelfke, Richard Pressler and Ryan Serewicz discuss how to help people who are interested in software development figure out if it might be a good fit for them. Along the way, they dive into the topic of coding bootcamps as well as discuss their own beginnings with software development.
Detailed notes:
0:00 - Intros. How to explain software development to people who don't know it.
1:50 - Why does your friend want to code? Get on the emotional rollercoaster of coding.
2:45 - Bootcamps - Who do they work for, who don't they work for?
9:00 - Self paced course/book learning as an alternative to bootcamps.
11:40 - What sparked your interest in coding?
13:30 - The TI-83 calculator was an important milestone in programming.
14:34 - I want to build R2D2!
16:00 - Beginning with Devops and Amazon Web Services. Other tools that can help out beginners.
18:45 - The ups and downs of frontend development.
22:45 - What is the theme of success in people who do well in software development?
25:00 - What happened to books!?
26:15 - Middle out learning
27:00 - Pickle a friend.com! Creative use of the  tag.
28:00 - Picks!
Brandon - America's Test Kitchen recipes.
Jesse - Harvest time tracking software.
Richard - The Syntax podcast.
Ryan - The Orbitbrown youtube channel.