Yeah
Good morning everyone
I'm excited to chat with Alex today. Good morning
This is the 99 dev problems show
I am unfortunately a little under the weather this morning and have been for the past couple of days
But we have an amazing guest with us today. And so we will not slow down
And I am super excited to bring on Alex Alex. I would love for you to introduce yourself
Absolutely Tessa. Thanks. My name is Alex Burke been in the tech industry a little over a decade
started in
retail mostly B2B
companies
Works for a local web shop for a little while
Transitioned into a bigger tech company was in Seattle for some time
And have made my way through a different startup and landed here at shipy. I'm
The current startup I work for and it's basically a
reuniting of Zulu Lee and Amazon bets so a lot of people that I have worked with in the past and
Some others that are new faces but been here for about almost three years
That is really fun when you get to work with a team that you've worked with before assuming that they're a good team
Right, but it's it's nice to have that kind of known connection and sort of understand people's
You know different ways of working and operating
Absolutely. Yeah, and if I if I didn't like working with them, I wouldn't have come back
It's a great team and oddly enough almost the same small team that I was a part of it Zulu Lee
Has reunited here. So it's we already work together
We we kind of know each other and of course we've hired and added new people into that family
Which is kind of buzzword that people don't say but very close tightly knit team. So it's it's been a good good time
Oh, I love that
I mean, I think it's it's good to always have that like healthy work-life balance
But I also think that it's it's good to like build those really strong relationships with your coworkers because it does make a
Very long portion of your weekday a lot more enjoyable when you can do that
Absolutely. Yeah, and we have a good time
the
What's tough is you know since so I worked in person with most of these people
I feel like if I hadn't had that I don't know how I would have developed some of these relationships
and post COVID it's I love working from home, but
Something different about having spent a couple years working in person at desks poking each other for help with things
pairing on problems. I
Guess we've adapted to doing that remotely, but it definitely
Is strengthen the relationships I have with colleagues now
Yeah
You know, that's actually that's a really beautiful thing to bring up
We talked a lot in pre-show and I definitely want to dig into the tech stuff
but I want to double tap into what you just said because
I personally selfishly want to share a beautiful little memory
I had this morning and just sort of ask you about yours, right is I think that there's something here with that office time, right?
You have to get that time in you have to especially like as an engineer like getting that sort of mentorship time in
For me like I started out as a freelancer taught myself how to code and then got a role in an actual job
And it was just so enlightening of like different even different ways of working different ways of standardizing different ways of thinking
Because I taught myself how to code, you know, and so I think going into
Remote life is also very beautiful
I got to play with my son in the snow for the first time this morning, which was like the most amazing thing
And if it right and so if if we are working in offices all the time
We don't necessarily get to enjoy moments like that
But at the same time there is this beautiful fruitfulness in spending time with fellow engineers
I feel like you have a lot to share on that topic both on the family side and the technical side
So I'll just leave that open-ended for you. Yeah, absolutely
Yeah, I can relate to the morning family time
I mean this morning was pancakes and eggs and sausage and we get to do that
Almost every day wake up early and the kids are up shortly after us. Hopefully in theory
We have food for them when they wake up. Otherwise it takes a little longer
Yeah, those those connections don't for sure wouldn't have happened pre remote life for me
I you know, I had to be in the office at
7 8 maybe 9 but I mean never later than 9 and there's a commute and
Yeah, would have missed out on hours on both ends of the day of time with the family
So we were lucky enough that we had kids post COVID or middle of COVID
So they're still young and they've not known the
commuting dad life
So that's been a huge blessing
But yeah to your other point I
Built my the beginning of my career was built on in-person
relationships in-person work and a cadence of you know being able to ad hoc ask for question or ask for answers and ask for help
With things especially as a junior, you know turning around my desk and asking somebody
What was up with this legacy code that I was diving into and maybe in a language that I hadn't even used
Spent some time in VB six back in the day and it was kind of on the end of its life
But you know it was still around and working, but I didn't know what I was looking at
They don't teach that in college usually so yeah
Something there's an unspoken
openness when you're in person that people are just
Generally if you're on a good team, they're open to you turning around and asking questions. Yeah, you have to be really intentional and
a
Self-starter when you're remote to make that happen
Because you can't just turn around and ask a question you have to interrupt somebody
potentially in the middle of flow or send them an email and hope that they have some time book a meeting start a slack huddle
everything is proactive
everything has the potential to interrupt and
So it becomes this balance and for me as well like I have to turn slack off at sometimes
I have to turn it on at other times after
Kind of structure my days around when I'm gonna allow distractions when I'm gonna sure reach out to other people to distract them
And I'm not perfect so I don't do a great job that but it's in the back of my head
I know that if I don't structure those things into my day, they're not gonna happen
And it's the same for all of us. We're all kind of working together to figure out what that looks like
Yeah, I agree. You know as you were sharing that too. It really made me realize like
How difficult it is when you join a new company to even just find a channel where you just feel safe to go ask a question
And it's not that it's like a feel safety thing that the company has made you feel unsafe
It's more that you're like well
I don't want to dilute an important channel that has a meaningful conversations
That is not related to that and I don't see it, right?
Or I don't want to bug someone who is in a channel that thinks it's like wow this one's a merchant or this one's
You know, right? You just don't ever quite know slack is an endless hole in some companies or a very bare minimum in others, right?
You never know what to expect and I think it brings up the point of like I really feel like in it
Especially in an engineering world that it's like if there was a channel that's just like
Ask for help or just like get help, right?
That's just so basic that takes away all of the pressure like just everything that that comes with where do I ask a question?
Where do I put this? How do I ask it? And it's just open-ended like hey
Oh hitting my mic here because I'm all verbally expressively talking
Yeah, long story short you get the idea
Yes, right and it's like we need to make a safe space even though a company isn't necessarily unsafe
It's just how we think and like how we operate
We don't want to we don't want to bug our peers when they're in the flow because we've been there, you know
Absolutely. Yeah, I have a few thoughts on that because I've experienced two very different approaches to try to solve that
I'd say kind of off the bat. I know that there's a lot of
Engineers specifically the more experienced ones at my company who will just turn off the presence mode in Slack
So there's no green bubble. It's it's dark like we don't know if they're online or not. I think that's really closet debts
exactly
For the people who need and sometimes that's me it depends on yep the week probably and the project but
Totally you really need a
Block of multi-hour focus you have to do that you either have to turn off slack and
Log out of it or you have to go dark and proactively open it when you need it
Otherwise, you're gonna you're gonna see channels that you forgot you were part of you're gonna see
Mentions that accidentally include you because there's a slack group that you got tagged that you're a part of it's
Constant, you know that on top of the fact that you may have a phone in your pocket
It's just an unlimited way unlimited number of ways to reach you that you don't need to distract you
That'll keep you from getting things done
so I think that's kind of a simple way to
Just turn off at times, but so obviously we use slack at shipy him
Yeah, I think it's a great tool and it works really well for you. Yeah
It's still a big distraction. So you have to I think you really have to each person has to figure out how to manage
Their presence in slack at my last company
company called you avionics
It's a hardware startup
sense has merged with another company and
Was probably the coolest job that I've had in my career. We were building
The company was building micro
electronics for aviation so generally general aviation
DPS systems and drone systems and
Actually has built some drones and then
Some some other things I probably can't talk about but really cool tech and then I was building the software
So the company is mostly mechanical and electrical engineers or
similar fields
And then a small handful of us that were doing software
On top of that. So we were building a cloud system that remotely controlled drones
If you bought it down to one sentence, it was awesome. Hey, that is really cool work. We could talk about that at length
Obviously, I got this. I had a great few years there
Then there was the company changed a little bit. There was a merger. Yeah, and at that time I got an awesome opportunity with shipy him
Yeah, so made the change and joined my old team, but I still think that was probably the coolest job
I've had and the way that they handle
presence and
Ad hoc communication is so different than like the big tech slack industry
There are no slack company
There are there are no messaging platforms at that company that can like house
Information because as you probably know slack turns into a wiki you yeah
You search through your messages for that one document that you sent somebody a year ago and it becomes your inbox
And it's not conducive for that. It's not conducive. It's not secure. It's not built for that
there's no real good way to
Organize and pull information at scale. So it becomes this
Slog of yeah
Another inbox that you have to search through and hope that their search function works the way you wanted it to
I mean, that's kind of what it is for us. So yeah, I think it's been that way everywhere
I've used it and yeah, I think that's probably the biggest downside to slack is it becomes something it wasn't meant to do
Yep. Yeah, sure. So not have that was a great benefit of not having it what we did it you have Yonex was
They had a presence
application that everyone had open at all times and it was you know a small gooey window that I think there's a newer
competitor that does something similar
But I can't remember the name but anyway everyone has their own little icon in a little desk in a picture of an office and
If it's it's it's really funny and and cute in a way
But if you're logged into it, which you're supposed to be when you're online
It shows your little emoji in your office. Yep, and if you're not
So, you know if somebody's working or not working
Got it. So is that like VPN based so it's like you're you're logged in and not logged in or do you have to go into the
gooey login every day
You have to go in and log in but it's you know, it's a startup application. It just opens
So you don't actually
You're online. It's online
Exactly now you can turn it off if you want to close it and but
Kind of the understanding amongst every team was and it's a small company. Everyone's just supposed to be on there
Yeah, totally and then to
It has audio and video as a part of the platform
So you can go in there and click on someone's office and your emoji will enter their office and pop up an audio video
Channel like immediately is adorable. No, I will say that that part is
So stressful because you'll hear the little like no notification and and you're in a call with whoever just entered your room
What like instant you don't get to say no, yeah, no, you can't you can't you can't turn it off unless you close the application
So obviously like the video doesn't start without your permission
But but yeah, that part's kind of I would not like that
Yeah, but but I will say that it does probably the best job that I can think of of replicating the like turn around and ask somebody a
question
Yeah, I
Do like that. Yeah, so it worked. Okay. It was
As I said, it was very different model than the big tech for sure lack model and zoom, you know, everything is kind of manual
That would be a perfect model though
Not sorry not to just jump in quick
But that'd be a perfect model if you could just reject and accept the call then it'd be perfect, right?
Like as long as you give me a chance like hey, I'm in work mode. So I'm actually gonna reject your call like
Pop in a little follow-up message. Hey, I'm in the deep, right? Like a schedule time with me or whatever, you know
I don't know and it's it's been a few years. You could probably set those types of things up
It's I'm sure, you know, I'm sure there's I remember there are notifications
I don't remember what I all had to click but for sure there was a notification when someone entered your room
Maybe you had to like I'm sure AI could rebuild this horse
exactly right
But it was it was an interesting concept and
Very different. So anyway, yeah, I will say that because that
Application was the main mode of like ad hoc communication
There's a pretty high level of respect for people's time and
totally
For the most part there was probably one or two exceptions
High in the company other than those exceptions people didn't just jump in like you would DM somebody first
And there's a chat in it. You would chat and be like, hey, let's let's chat on this if you're free
And that's kind of how like peer-to-peer conversations happened
and and because it was so instant it was really easy to facilitate those and
Also, everyone like had that respect of I'm not just gonna jump in and interrupt people everyone's like heads down
doing their work getting stuff done and
The the bar I think for interruptions was higher than yeah, like zoom model totally
and it also forced documentation and
Like general information to be stored more structured because you didn't have the slack option
There was no zoom. There was no wiki everything we
stored was either in a structured document or
I'm trying to remember most of it was actual documents were docs Excel files in the company
You know network storage basically
Hand-rolled SharePoint kind of model
Yeah
But but not Microsoft anyway, I have a follow-up question for you. Yeah, super different
Okay, so I'm hearing this right and like as I'm hearing this
I'm like this is beautiful
And I think it really speaks to like different companies have different cultures and different ways of working right and it all comes down from that leadership
What they sort of instill?
Snap had this beautiful thing called council snapchat is what I'm referring to
And apparently people got they it's not apparently I was a part of it and they was beautiful
People got together in circles and you'd have very open conversations
But whatever was shared in that circle, which was called council
You could not leave and tell anyone about like you just couldn't it was like a safe space
It was beautiful and I'm sitting here and I'm sort of like you're talking about this and I'm like wow
I wonder and I'd love to hear what you think about this and then we should probably talk about what you do in your day-to-day
But I think you and I similar to many could talk for a long time
Do you think that now that we can build these
Different applications that sort of bring together bits and pieces more quickly via AI is basically what I'm alluding to
You could probably build that infrastructure at which you are speaking to and in like a half a day or a day if you knew exactly
What you wanted and brought AI together and a part of me is sitting here of like are the tools like slack and some of these other
Ones gonna actually start to get cut out because they do have a ridiculously high price and if it ends up being sort of this
distraction is there a more efficient way for us to be working and
Are we gonna see cultures and teams shift because I'm doing it personally in my own work now
I am a team of one
But I can I'm already starting to sort of mold and shift and wanting to remove things that cost money and just invest in the infrastructure
At which I'm building so curious what you think of that. Yeah, good question
Hate to say it but as anything it depends I think totally that's very
That's the true technical developer answer
But so I'll I'll I'll say I think it aligns with my two experiences the answer that I would offer
At at you have Yonix small company
not a
software
Big tech company more a hardware company with with software. I think they were already doing that
That's part of the reason we were using that tool. It's very inexpensive
Yep, it was a startup. We there was a lot of resistance
In many ways for good reason to things like I
Don't I don't want to throw all these companies under the bus
but you know anything that does like observability and logging and
Even documentation and wikis all of those like big tech offerings are wildly expensive
So there was resistance. We didn't have any of those at you have Yonix and saved tens
If not hundreds of thousands of dollars not fine, right?
So I totally think that there will be more of that
Going forward where people just are resistant to it and on that note
I think open source has caught up a lot of ways with with you know
We because there was resistance to some of the you know, big name offerings in those observability spaces
We used Rafauna and Loki and Prometheus at you have me on X which was my choice. I was like, yeah
You're probably right
In our team meetings like we really don't need to spend
This amount of you know the equivalent of an entire salary to get this offering. Let's just use the open source
Version and we have plenty of experience. We'll just set it up
some you know
virtual machines and run it ourselves and
At certain scale that's totally doable. I think right if you get too big. Yeah, you need a team or dedicated person
So that's where I think it depends the barrier to maintainability becomes a little bit more difficult
I agree with that
But we did fine with those open source
Offerings and you know, I got I got everything set up in a week
And then we used them with a lot of success and there were
three
To four
Software developers on my team and that was fine. We didn't spend a whole lot of time maintaining
so that was great, I think in
The shipy a model where we're a little bit bigger and it's a much more enterprise focused space
Almost all of our customers are enterprise customers and that's the market
The scale is vastly bigger at least on the software side. Yep
It was when you're doing hardware and embedded systems
You need you need software that supports that hardware, but we weren't targeting
Technology enterprise customers with the software offering as a service. So, you know, now I'm in B2B sass
It's a huge scale
millions and millions of
events or you know logging events or
API requests
depending on the service per second per minute per hour per day, you know, it kind of varies but everything's measured in millions and
managing I could I could imagine spinning up those open source offerings, but
You start by scaling
Vertically, but then you immediately hit an AWS cap
where the cost outweighs what you
Just out of box with the the big tech solutions. So
Yeah, I think to summarize the answer. I think that smaller companies or one person solo devs or
or
contractors at a certain scale
would be better off
for many
years depending on the scale doing the open source thing or rolling their own or
Using the, you know, Linux offerings for things like logging. There's a lot of stuff you can just do without a big gooey
I
Think things will move that way. Probably already have started to move that way with the smaller startups, but I think
because of the
pain in
Scaling to millions, I think there will still be a huge market for the really expensive offerings
Yeah, just because you can spin it up faster and it works and your engineers whose time is really expensive and very valuable
Don't have to worry about maintaining it
Yeah, you may already have a DevOps team
We do here at shipium. So
They already know how to manage those things and can that's your
Manage the paid out-of-box solution until maybe we roll our own if we need to I think there's like I
Feel like now I'm getting on a tangent, but I feel like Netflix has a lot of
Blogs and like you saw these things happen for them where everything's in-house and
They rolled their own for like so long and then at some point they moved to AWS
And I think I remember seeing that they have now moved a lot of stuff back out of AWS
Because it got too expensive and now they have this mixed model of on-prem
Roll their own hand rolled stuff, but they still have some things in AWS
That has been my experience here at shipium. That was my experience at zoo Lily
Which was where I worked before
I think I think it's gonna go up and down for most companies
As the scale continues to grow if they're still alive and the scale continues to go up
I think things become cost prohibitive
Where where it was worth
Getting your startup off the ground with an out-of-the-box solution
Eventually you're gonna hit the point where the scale is so big the cost is too much and you go back to using around solution
Yeah, well, it's interesting. I mean, that's how SAS started, right?
That's how all of that these things even got to the place that they're at
What what my brain is like really?
Curious about I think is probably the right word is like will AI supplement the ability to build things in-house
In a way where it will see it more now because I do think that we're seeing
We are definitely seeing a shift in a lot of different directions
I'm seeing a lot of hardware stuff, which is super cool and exciting especially after hearing your story. I
Just like I had a client who was on the path towards robotics and hardware is their main use case and
Really it was really excited about that. Yeah, but long story short. I think that we're also seeing a shift away from cloud
I'm not saying that cloud is not the way right cloud
You know being sort of the Kubernetes and that being that beautiful, you know overly complicated stack sometimes
But it's not always the answer and so I think that there is I think generally and this is just my own hypothesis both
In-personal life and professional life. I think humans are questioning everything at this point in time
And so it's sort of just this new space of like who do I trust what do I trust?
What's actually the right answer and we're sort of reforming our own hypothesis on how we want to live and operate?
Absolutely. Yeah, I agree with everything you said. I don't think I have anything to add but to answer the question about AI
I
Absolutely, it's going to help people move more quickly. I
Generally live more in the skeptic camp of these hype cycles
But I have
I'm very close with some people who are on the opposite end of the spectrum of both the crypto and the AI hype cycles
Yeah, and so I can see both sides
I
Live in I'm a cautious person in general so that doesn't help, you know
I'm not I'm never gonna be all in on the next type cycle
That means I miss out on some things, but it also means I'm against certain other things like a crypto crash for example, but
With AI for sure it helps people move faster
I think the thing that's tough for me is I don't think it's ever going to be because
Because by nature what we have in the way of AI right now is not fully predictable and
Deterministic yep, there's always gonna be a person who has to
Have the experience to judge what it outputs. Yeah, so
This discourse about like AI is gonna take your job
Is
misleading in my opinion. Yeah, I fully agree. I think it's going to make some things much more
quick and
To your point you can get something out the door
Maybe much more quickly because it auto completes or it gives you some boilerplate or it gives you ideas about how to structure a class or
Or a project or it gets rid of your webpack config
Because you forgot some syntax or some property in the documentation, you know those types of things are great
It's it's the it has removed the
Barrier to going and googling something because it already was trained on that information
Yeah, but because it's not determined properly googling it which has been a major pain point for developers
I just like it was always a joke in the beginning when you become a developer
It's like learn to Google things once you learn how to Google stuff exactly once you know how to search for the right things
You're good to go
Exactly, so it's a new skill
How do you ask AI for exactly what you need and not get the wrong answers?
But you still have to review the code you still have to know what like if you couldn't have written what it gave you
Then in my opinion you need to go figure out what it gave you
right, yes, that's where that's where bugs and
And I mean AI slop is kind of what everyone's referring to now
That's where it comes from is it's the same problem that Stack Overflow and Google gave us but it's
More scaled now and it comes faster
Yeah, yep, I agree. Oh wow. This has been such a good conversation and like I haven't even really dove into your day-to-day, so let's let's uh
Pivoting back to
Sort of shipy I'm in what you do in your day-to-day. I'd love to hear more about that. Obviously even at zoo Lily
You know spent some time doing some cool hardware, you know type of stuff, but in software
I should say you did software in hardware. That's the better way to term it
So what are you doing today?
And like what is sort of what are some of the challenges you can share and some of the things that you're thinking about either both?
Technically from a stack or language standpoint to you know actual sort of challenges that you can share
Absolutely. Yes, so I am on the front-end team
Which is great. It's full stack type script. We manage
What is the UI for shipy them?
But because we're all types crap type script experienced we have a
Pretty wide breadth of services under our teams management. So we have a lot of that's cool node
We have a little bit of bun we have
We have react
Everything front-end is react, but we've experimented with remix we have react router which has since swallowed remix, but
We have the pre remix react router to
We we've done a little bit of exploration into Tanner Linsley's tool stack tool set with react query
And he now has 10 stacks start I did a little bit of investigation into that
So yeah, we use fastify and some of our services
We have what's great about being a startup is we get to explore what the best tool for pretty much every job
Is and decide on that how to solve it. So that's really great
We're a pretty senior team, which is good
But also means that the like number of things that we deal with is pretty significant
So I could spend I could spend a day doing DevOps work and fixing or building pipelines to get deployments out
I might be
Fudging with engine X on a given day because we need to change a header size or we need to add
the
Location server to get some like sub path routed differently
But I also might spend my day building components in a react library or
Or just general, you know building a new page for our front-end
and then all the way down to no JS and
API's some of our API's are
Like first-class API's that our customer facing and some of them are more like Gateway no JS services that
That pass UI traffic through to back-end services on other teams, which is a pretty common like orchestration pattern
so we have a few different models there but
Tech stack I spend a lot of time in TypeScript and then dealing with
DevOps work whether it's AWS services or
Or pipelines we use GitLab. So everything is like CI first-class stuff where you have a GitLab file and you
basically tell it what to do and then you have either bash scripts or
or Docker images or a combination usually of all of that and
Eventually it ends up in AWS toasted infrastructure, which the list is you know in long
So that's like the tech answer
In terms of what we're doing the main UI that we offer is called our partner console
And it's basically the way that our customers
configure and interact with
Their fulfillment network within our system so shipy. Um as as an offering is a way to
Set up multi carrier accounts things like FedEx and DHL and UPS and USPS and CDL, you know, there's a list
Yeah, many long. I I don't know if I can say how many we support but you can imagine hundreds of thousands of
But you can imagine hundreds that exist in just the United States and for sure we are now outside of the US so we have a huge offering of carriers that we support
And that's one of our big products. It's carrier selection
So a customer will use our UI to set up all of those accounts and
Figure how they want them to interact
There's some mapping codes that we can use to configure our
There's some mapping code that they can look at a map and see where on the map their different fulfillment centers are and how they interact with each other
So, you know, a lot of code to handle all those different things. Some of it we go anywhere from like boilerplate form code all the way to mapping and charts and reporting and
It's very data intensive because we're dealing with huge volumes of shipments and carrier interactions and and tracking of course, which is event based you get tons of events and all of that has to be
Analyzed and touched by back end systems and and then eventually UI does some type of presentation, whether it's not port or changing what they actually want to be configured around those fulfillment centers and
Network operations or generating like on the fly reporting based on historical data. That's that's kind of one pretty wide reaching part of our business. We have another product called simulation, which has been really popular with customers. We're basically using
In number of historical shipments or or fulfillment locations, etc, etc. Things like
Things like delivery times and like times and transit between two locations, all of that data comes into play. They can input that data into our system and then use it to simulate future results. So, that's cool.
Yeah, like at its most basic description, they're inputting tons of historical data and they get reports and and analysis on what it will look like for the next month for the next six months for the next year.
That's helpful. Hey, so like the big a big use would be like I want to change one thing. Let's say I want to open up a new warehouse in Nevada. And I want to see what it's going to look like if I add that to my fulfillment network and then push a million shipments through it.
They put that into the system. They see what rate shopping might look like. You know what kind of prices based on historical data what kind of prices might I get from my big carrier accounts and where can I save money. Where am I going to lose money. How can I make adjustments to my entire network so that I'm maybe
My profitable. Yeah, off the top of my head. Maybe you want to save a dollar per yeah, or 1000 shipments or something something random. You can make a bunch of tweaks and see what it might look like based on the data that you've seen in the past.
And it's I mean it's easy money, you know, make changes to your network. You don't have to enforce those changes you can simulate what it might look like. And that's repeatable. And you found a way to save millions of dollars. Okay, let's put it. Let's make it live. Let's configure this new fulfillment network or let's add a new carrier account or we're going to change the prioritization of a certain shipping method.
All that kind of stuff which people historically would do with Excel files or you know in on the data scientists and floor data science. Yeah, running models in in house.
Now they can just do a simulation which you know does take some work, but they can see it without affecting their bottom line immediately. Yeah, for sure. And then now they know what the changes could look like they can put it into production and have that knowledge and save money.
So a lot of it is cost savings and it's huge because when you get to a scale of millions of shipments, it only takes a few cents and you're saving millions of dollars.
Right. And on top of that, it sounds like if they care about this, not that all companies do, but if they care about this customer service can also be an element of this right so you could start to preconfigure how do we get shipments into customers hands quicker or
in a more efficient way right if they're just down the street why are we sending it all the way to the next metro city through the US Postal Service when it can go through a local service. Yeah, dang. I love that. Okay, very cool.
Yeah, so that's that's most of what we do. There's we have some other products to your point about delivery guarantees, estimated delivery dates, because of the quantity of data and the fact that we have models running around that.
We have found that we can make we have a basically our whole business model is around a delivery promise.
You as a customer you as a business should be able to promise your customers when things are going to be delivered and using carrier data. Yeah, that historically is not possible carriers.
The big carriers have time and transit data that they update frequently and basically gives you an estimate of days between certain zip codes. You can imagine a huge Excel file going from zip code in California to zip code in Boston.
Without thinking about anything going on in the economics or societal world either. Exactly. And because we have more data and can run it through models, and we have it spread across many carriers, we are a lot more accurate.
And so that's a huge, huge part of it is your customers want to know when they're going to get a package. They want to get it fast and they also want to want it to be right. And so that's a huge part of our offering is you can do that.
And with just just carrier data, you miss that a lot.
Yeah. Wow.
Okay, super cool.
I'm trying to think where to even take that there that is it. That's fun.
Okay, hold on trying to think through my normal questions. I have sick foggy brain. Okay, so is there are there. Have there been any major technical challenges that you've had to solve and if so, what was your path to solving them.
You don't have to explain all the tech obviously there's some proprietary things you obviously can't share. But curious more about your problem solving technique and then you know how you sort of landed at that resolution.
Sure.
I know that's a hard question.
Sometimes it's crystal clear and sometimes it's like what every single day I don't know which one you want to talk about.
Absolutely. Yeah, I will. So I have a number of answers that come up. I will say that I'm not sure if I can share most of them, but I will say I think we actually have a public case study with MongoDB.
And that has been a huge positive for us we use Mongo pretty heavily and
Just to be on the safe side, I won't go into a ton of detail, but we have had to change the way that we scale Mongo behind the scenes.
And yeah, I can imagine their data.
Yeah, I mean, we've had to solve what would basically be a system design question in most interviews because we're running at that level of scale. And that's been a pretty interesting problem. A lot of that started as I was joining and then has continued but
Databases as a whole don't deal with huge quantities of data. I mean, you can choose any database. Yeah, they aren't really mostly built to scale into the hundreds of millions end up and up.
So we've had to do things like sharding things change the way that we store data offload workloads do things asynchronously.
Those have been really interesting problems. I will say that my team isn't doing most of those but we're certainly involved.
Mostly back end teams dealing with that kind of thing. But that's probably the most relevant interesting thing I can think of that I know for sure I can talk about.
Yeah, well, I love that you brought that up.
I think Mongo has like there's some great people over there and they have a really great product and I think not to speak poorly at all about them. I think it's they're great. Right.
I wanted to say most because I do think that it's it's kind of interesting and I love this is the reason I love these conversations is like the more that developers can have these conversations the more we can learn about different technologies and different solutions.
So when I said most in my head I was like you got to check out Harper DB which is one of my clients.
And it's it's just one of those things right of like we all have these different technology technological challenges. Let's see if I can talk this morning.
But we have different ways that we solve them right we have an investment that we make to different tools. So we continue to make those investments.
Then there are other tools that do you know sort of the same jobs but differently we're like on pre show I was telling you about Harper DB because for that reason is that they actually specialize in extremely scalable databases with expansive data for e-commerce specifically.
And I won't get into the whole tech stack mostly because I don't fully understand it. But I what I do understand and know is just how it operates in its infrastructure and that it can actually do that read data extremely quickly because what you can do is actually through just modern job script.
Go in and actually set where you want these various cash layers to exist so it'll pull in that data supply it for you maintain that data and sort of work through different operations at which it can essentially make it more performant.
There's a lot more to it but I just wanted to drop that there I don't get a chance to talk about my clients very frequently especially when it's like a very nerdy nerdy nerdy niche use case like this.
But still nonetheless I think it's awesome that your team has also realized this is a challenge and solved it through MongoDB which if anyone has used that right beautiful tool to use as well.
So many tools in our toolboxes.
Yeah no that's cool I haven't heard of Harper DB I'll definitely check them out do you happen to know are they like brand new from scratch they built their own database are they backed by a specific platform.
Can you say any of that.
Yeah so okay I would say it if I could if I knew all of it but like you know it's it's that thing of like I know what I know but I don't want to speak to the exact stack at which it was built some things I have context on but long story short they're not new they were actually a client of mine like way back in like
2020 when I was living in Denver they're out of Denver they met me then and they were very early and so at that early stage they were more like a Mongo competitor but still had this efficiency in this performance focus.
And so I was helping them with just Devereaux so it was mostly coaching guiding their team on sort of how to build up a developer brand.
And then they re tapped in because I asked them for a quote for my business this last year and basically the CEO was like we got to bring it back to us like if this is what she's doing which Stephen shout out to you you're awesome.
Appreciate the love.
Yeah but now they have found tons of enterprise success like with fortune very low that I cannot mention and been able to do that through this enterprise approach but they very much need the developer self serve love and so that's actually what we're working on now is like improving those docs improving that experience so that a developer like you who is still building these beautiful enterprise you know extremely kind of cutting edge technology solutions for the enterprise can still find those tools and so that is why they are a client but
I can get you the answer in the infrastructure because there is a couple sort of one proprietary bit that's in there that's I think it's lime something but I'll get you the the actual specs on it.
It's funny because this week I'm diving into building sort of a to tutorial and kind of a little like example to like show devs. This is the aha moment that makes them different from another database right.
And so that's a pretty fun project so yeah anyways let's digress about me just you know spill in on my clients but I do think it's a beautiful opportunity when I can talk about it.
Yeah that's great.
Yeah OK so we got to talk about a lot of personal life stuff to I try to end these at 1045 but it like never happens I tried for 1030 in the beginning that was crazy and I'm talking central I'm not as lucky as you're in Eastern so yeah exactly.
I would love if you're open to it to talk about your personal life and just some of your beliefs and how that comes into play.
I believe what you believe fundamentally I think we didn't talk about every single value and moral.
Sure.
Anyways if you're open to it I would just love to talk about sort of personal life and how I think that played into your decisions to join shipy.
I'm in you know the goodness you shared in the pre show.
Absolutely yes no we'd love to talk about it so.
I'm a Bible believing Christian.
Obviously we didn't talk about the specifics in the pre show and we don't need to but because you know how many things that could mean these days Christianity could be.
It's any number of things after you dive into it but we we try to follow the Bible in our household and.
You know it means we have a moral standard and you know it colors how we raise our children and for sure it helps me decide where I'm going to work who I'm going to work with you know how I'm going to behave and interact with other people you know having respect for colleagues.
I think to answer your question about how I ended up joining shipy I think my biggest the biggest weight that I play or that I place on a new company decision is around the people and same.
Luckily I already knew a lot of the people at shipy we worked together as Zulily and the opportunity came up at a perfect time.
But having those relationships and that level of respect already having worked together as Zulily and you know starting the conversation about the opportunities they had for me was pretty much a no brainer it was very easy to join already had you know a mutual trust and knowledge of skills and what we could do together and so.
Yeah I love I'm all in on the tech and and the software offering and the company and our mission.
And you know I have my supply chain now which is in on one hand hilarious but you know also you know I'm all in on it so it's it's a cool thing but but the reason I joined is because of the people.
Yeah it's a great team my small team my individual front and team is great there's.
We're as I said we're pretty senior heavy which is always fun you know everyone has a lot that they can offer and a wide variety of different experiences none of us is.
Each of us has some expertise in areas that others don't which which is great for working together and then across the company we have such a wide ranging level of experience a lot of people from Amazon a lot of people from Zulily.
Pretty deep supply chain roots so everyone has amazing for the most part everyone has been in supply chain for many years if not many decades so you know the problems that we're solving have either already been solved in the past by these people in different ways or the solutions are in some ways known or the problems are known and therefore we can do a good job of providing the solutions.
So it's really cool you you learn a lot kind of all the time if you know where to look and where to listen.
But definitely came here for the people and have stayed because of the people.
Yeah I love that.
I think you know and you and I talked about this in pre show and I'll very openly say this is like I've been a.
I mean I've been a Christian my whole life but only because God's been chasing me which is a whole nother beautiful story that I've absolutely love and love to share but most recently within the last like five years have been like oh hey I see you chasing me I got you and have reciprocated and definitely try to live by the Bible as well I'd like to say it's a progressive version it's not necessarily progressive progressive but I think it's it's my version that just puts everyone's heart first right it's like that's like the love my neighbors like that is how it works.
That's what I try to live by right and so I think that in tech.
You know it's not always easy to talk about these things I have been very judged for my you know Christianic beliefs and understand it right we all have different understandings of different groups and what have you.
But I just I feel like it's it's sort of time to you know maybe stop hiding it as much as I have been and unveiling it just because I really think that it's it is who I am and if someone does respect or enjoy you know being around me it doesn't mean they have to be a Christian but if I can help someone you know find their way if that's the way or find their way because maybe it's the other way like that's all my heart cares about and so I just thought it was a.
You came in and it's just very serendipitous the last few last few of my guests and also been believers and so I don't know in my heart there's just there's something here that's like hey.
Yes, you know we can be somewhat labeled but I'd like to believe the ones of us who are truly the the I don't want to say that we're even good believers but we are the true disciples right.
We're on the good side and I'd love nothing more than the whole world to just love each other so.
Yeah, the disciple is a fun word that that was kind of taboo in the 90s and 2000s people.
Oh yeah.
Just yeah it was disciple saying saying disciple was different than Christian and they're I mean they're not different it's just kind of the label we gave that word for so long but disciple of Jesus is a follower of Jesus but I totally agree with what you said.
Like there's there shouldn't be a reason to hide these things in the same way that you shouldn't hide your other beliefs I mean if you're not a Christian you have some type of belief system.
Yeah, feel free to share that.
Absolutely.
What's tough is the I think I mean this is a whole can of worms but I think it is our country the United States claims to be founded on the Christian ideal.
That's a deep conversation. Yeah, but the the our country is not Christian just because everyone likes to talk about the fact that they have a Bible or that God we trust.
Yeah, yeah, in God we trust you know one nation under God which has probably been removed from a lot of schools but you know whatever whether or not that's in the school doesn't affect our discipleship or our Christianity.
But you know those types of things where we have tried to first mix church and state but then also like claim that our country is Christian and that God loves America.
That's not how God operates.
Yeah, yeah.
Pick up the Bible.
God is way outside and way bigger than our man made political divides and political ideas and you know two party system and our small little country in the you know, expanse of an 8 billion person planet like it's it's so contrived and and egotistical to say that like we're God's country because that's just
That's not how God operates. God wants us. He wants a relationship with us and you can find out a lot about God's character and Jesus's character in the Bible, but it's not going to talk about America and
I think that's part of like what has turned so many people off to people talking about the Bible talking about Jesus or talking about Christianity in the workplace or just in life in general is those things have become mixed and we've applied.
We've pulled the God card in places that should not have been pulled. God is not our tool. We God made us if you believe if you believe in God and you believe in what the Bible says about him.
Then he is not your tool to use and direct it's it's it's so backwards and you know that's turned into things like hate and things like people call it judgment or feel judged or
Just the those those exceptions that have given such a bad name to God are not what God has intended for his creation. He did not make us to
Tear other people down and I mean to your point he did not Jesus Jesus said that the number two the number one and number two commands love God with all your heart love your neighbor as yourself and if you watch those were the most important exactly.
I mean yeah to have to have the son of God if you believe that wash his disciples feet is such a perfect metaphor for how God expects us to treat other people and yeah I think in some ways we've lost that and other ways it was never there in a lot of yeah yeah.
I think in the times that you're talking about it was never there right they were using what I think is cultural Christianity to sort of validate decisions and things that were made because it likely was you know deeper in the roots and we can have a whole conversation because there's always been some toxic form of Christianity right that's even in the Bible it's like immediate and it happens.
Yeah, I think that my my daughter I feel like if you are I mean obviously there are those that you know don't believe in you know the Jesus kind of side of things and still write our fundamentals are still in the same place we still believe that you know there is there is God but my daughter has this adorable book.
I can't remember his call but I will see if I can put in the show notes.
It almost makes me like one cracks it's such a beautiful book that basically it's kids book and it's like yeah it's so good and so it's like it talks about why why God's beautiful plan is essentially the whole premise of the book and so it talks about how God had this plan to create all of these humans to put them on earth together so that they could love each other they could.
Repopulate we would live in community we would live together supporting one another.
And then it talks about how God's plan has been destroyed essentially and how people don't live in community they don't love each other's neighbors and it's such a clear visual for children right boom like whoa.
This is obviously not the intended purpose of this world and his creation.
And then it speaks to like Jesus coming back and what Jesus did and how much he gives you know for his people and how he goes back right because the whole presence you know obviously precedent of Jesus coming back is like to to allow us to feel.
I think some of the intensity that we felt in all the generations but most recently I think around this like being perfect to the no sinning like we absolutely can't send and I think obviously that's why Jesus came back this why we have the New Testament right we've got a bit more of forgiveness like God realize that we are sinning humans.
And so the book speaks to that and then essentially comes back and it's like one day obviously like if you've read the Bible you know that there's a day when Jesus is going to come back for us and.
But essentially the book talks about it doesn't matter what stage that you're in it doesn't matter where you're at like God's beautiful plan was for us to live together until love each other and I think it's just every time I read it and I read it with my kids quite a bit it's like just a little tier.
Because that like that's the world like I want to see us living in and I just.
Yeah and I feel like more than anything that I think those of us who believe that and whose hearts are in that space. I just think it's important for us to talk about that because I don't care what you look like or your values or who you are or the decisions that you've made in your past.
I care about you feeling loved and you giving love for the rest of whatever your life looks like you know.
Yeah absolutely yeah I totally agree I think you think about how Jesus treated people and you know some of this is I think where we can miss the mark Jesus.
There's well I don't know I feel like I grew up knowing how hard Jesus was on the Pharisees and yeah and what your Christianity is tough you know in certain places yes yeah.
Exactly and you read about him overturning tables in the temple and you read about him calling the Pharisees of Brutus Vipers and I mean he rebukes them time and time again.
But I feel like and maybe this was just me but.
As a young kid I missed the fact that those are the teachers of the law who agree.
With who God is and we're trying to follow God to the best of their ability.
Therefore it was right for Jesus to call them to that higher status.
But who are we to ask our atheist co worker or our agnostic friend or our.
You know the Jew in our neighborhood expect them to follow the standard that we believe right.
That's not what God has asked us to do and the whole Old Testament is that story.
God's people are separate and holy set apart and he asks them to follow a standard.
And they're especially in I believe Deuteronomy it talks about welcoming in the foreigner.
You need to welcome in the foreigner and invite them into your community.
But they are in the same way that we live in today's society.
We are expecting them we should not be expecting them to live to the standard that they didn't sign up.
Yes yes.
We are Christians and part of our discipleship is to make other disciples and is to teach them how God wants to love them and how he wants them to love others.
And so evangelism and sharing that message is a part of our life.
But expecting somebody to live to that standard if they haven't signed up for it is not.
Yep.
I love that so much.
And I think that's that is a likely where I think a lot of hate has come into you know this kind of side of religious views right as the sort of expectations of I believe this so you should believe this and I think it's very crystal clear in the Bible that like that is not what we are are supposed to be doing right.
We are supposed to be loving if it's a fellow Christian different situation right but we are supposed to be loving and welcoming exactly because they're the same standard as ours.
Well I could keep talking about this for like a long time I am so appreciative to the listeners who have stuck by this part whether you believe or you don't believe I still love you.
And I think that's the beauty of it right and that's that's you know for me is like every single day it's a fight to be more like Jesus and I just need that reminder of like hey maybe I just have to go wash some feet.
Absolutely Wilson and agreed.
Okay.
Before we go shipy um and don't mind my like little tear I really I like the Holy Spirit really lives in me so like anything related to this that there's emotions with it and it's beautiful.
Very beautiful.
It's great.
Anyways, um shipy um they you okay let me rephrase this they might be hiring would you would you like to tell us about that.
Absolutely awesome let's let's talk about that.
Yes.
My team specifically is hiring we're looking for a front end developer to type script stack.
We're open to it's a remote position is a pretty like I mean I'm biased it's a pretty awesome gig.
The position is amazing the team is great very collaborative very kind thoughtful team and unfairly experienced if I do say so.
So a stacked load of mentors.
Love it.
Yes and and we get we have a ton of autonomy and a lot of freedom we are constantly evaluating new technology new solutions and I mean the handful of us on the team get to decide our fate so it's it's a really cool spot to be in and you don't need supply chain experience but of course that does help but we're really looking for the front end experience and.
Most of that is type script whether it's no JS or react you're gonna spend a lot of time okay awesome.
What other like are you looking for a specific experience level I know that's kind of a little that's a hard question it sort of depends but you know.
Let's fill in a couple other spots so maybe there's some folks that would better understand hey that's a good role for me.
Yes it is.
I would categorize it as a mid level position.
This is not going to be somebody who has.
Decades of senior level experience.
But we it's probably also not fresh out of college but I will say there's not a specific like rule around that we're just looking for somebody who has either a ton of hunger and.
An aptitude.
And or somebody who has.
A handful of years or really good quality experience I love that answer that's amazing okay fabulous I will link that in the show notes so I'll have you send that to me.
And share with with the listeners here and anyone who might listen in the future this will also go and.
I think it's if you click on my profile I think I have it linked as well but also perfect you.
To the job listing awesome well we will get that added either way.
Where can folks find you if they would like to chat with you or reach out to you directly.
Absolutely so this I'm kind of new to being terminally.
But I have I have linked and of course I do have a Twitter X account.
And I don't know what else exists these days I guess my Instagram is private so probably don't.
But I believe I am Alex C Burke on everything that I have so LinkedIn X GitHub.
That's the use for devs honestly.
Yeah that's probably the only place you need to look but I do own my domain I just don't really use it Alex C Burke everywhere.
I love that.
This has been an amazing conversation thank you everyone for sticking with us a little bit later today.
Honestly we've had an influx of viewers not a departure so that's a beautiful thing so thank you so much for being on the show Alex has been such a great conversation I am eternally grateful that you are now in my inner circle.
Totally agree it was great to meet you test that as an excellent conversation.
Yes it's absolutely do it again.
All right folks we're signing off throw up some prayers for me that I can keep things where they're supposed to be.
Start getting better.
Definitely yes.
All right have a great day.
Bye y'all have a great day.