Does crypto seem cryptic, and you don’t know where to start?  Sometimes the best way to learn is to dive in and immerse yourself.  In the first episode of this two part series, Brandon Aaskov and Dave Merwin from Dept’s Crypto collective will shed some light and share some resources to get you well on your way to understanding this exciting new frontier.

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 

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.

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)

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

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

• Matt - HBO Silicon Valley Season Six

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.

• Brandon - The Oculus Quest