The Ship It Podcast

In today's episode we talk with DEPT Digital Products Software Engineer Ali Halim about his origin story. We talk about late nights in college, what got him hooked, paying your dues in your first job and seizing opportunities to grow your career.  This is a great one for the aspiring technical team leaders out there!

Our Picks from this episode:

In this episode, we're talking about Architecture Sprints and why they're valuable.  Our client Bloomerang joins us for this one.  Bloomerang is the donor relationship and volunteer management platform for thousands of nonprofits. Their SVP of Payments, Evan DaSilva talks with us about how an Architecture Sprint with DEPT helped them get past a challenging situation with technical leadership during the busy end of year giving season! We dive into what an architecture sprint is and why it's a valuable investment to get your product moving, or moving again!

In this episode, we talk to DEPT® Project Manager Kate Flynn about her origin story: She talks about how she went from Architect, to Construction Manager, to Software Project Manager. This leads to a great conversation about the parallels between architecture and software, and what software engineering can learn from architecture. Kate also shares her thoughts on striking a balance between planning too much, and planning just enough. Finally, what origin story would be complete without a tale about building a two story underground bunker and powerlifting? Enjoy!

In this episode, we interview Jonah Jolley, Director of Engineering, and Stephanie Bressan, PSM, CSPO of DEPT® about the relationship between product and engineering teams.  

What makes a good partnership? What doesn’t make a good partnership? We also talk about the importance of empathy, trust, keeping priorities visible, and how you must come prepared with snacks! We wrap up with thoughts on Agile: Does it help or hurt? Do velocity metrics matter? Are standups even helpful?

On this episode of Ship It! We go further into the topic of CMS's, or Content Management Systems by talking about DEPT DASH, a new product from DEPT that helps you bootstrap applications that use headless CMS's like Strapi and Contentful.  Host Matt Merrill is joined by Allan Winterseick, Managing Partner, DEPT US and John Berger, Principal Engineer on DEPT DASH to talk about it as well as why you might use headless CMS's.

We also have a screencast of using DEPT DASH you can see here.

Links for our Picks:

Matt - "Breath" by James Nestor 

John - ADS-B Receivers on Raspberry PI 

Allan - "A Perfect Spy" by John Le Carre 

In this episode we dive into Content Management Systems or CMS's with two experts from DEPT®, Daniel Paterson and John Askew, both of whom have been working with large scale CMS's for over 10 years.  We answer the questions: Why do they exist?  What are their features? And why, as a developer, would I want to use once when I could make custom software that might do the job better?  We also dive into how to choose a CMS, headless CMS's as well as antipatterns for implementing CMS's. 

In this episode, we're continuing our Origin Stories which dive into how talented people got their start in software.  Today, DEPT® director of engineering Matt Merrill talks with DEPT® Executive Sponsor and Sr Director of Innovation Carlos Dominguez about how his interest got sparked in computers and his fascinating journey from his grandmother telling him that computers were the future, learning to program, and then finally how Jackie Chan and Jet Li got him into the video game industry.

At DEPT® we’re all builders, tackling projects from the interconnected realms of engineering and design. So much of what we build as engineers is often informed by the work of designers.  On Ship It! we often focus on engineering, but we haven't yet dove into the design side of the coin.

In this episode of our Origin Stories series, Matt Merrill talks to DEPT® Senior Product Designer Breon Waters II about how he got started and the various types of projects he has worked on.

Come with us as we explore the Digital Nomad lifestyle at DEPT®! In this episode we cover some key considerations to take into account if you’re thinking about pursuing this lifestyle: how to set the right expectations with clients, your friends, and (most importantly) yourself.

In this follow-up episode to our Crypto Through Immersion: Part 1, Dave Merwin and Brandon Aaskov from DEPT®’s crypto practice go into detail about how to get crypto safely. This episode covers centralized exchanges, decentralized exchanges (DEXes) and what “staking” is all about.