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8 Bits

8 Bits with Kendall Roden!

August 12, 2020 • Brandon • Season 2 • Episode 3

Kendal is Senior Engineer at Microsoft focusing on Azure!

Watch the Video Podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMm_vTp65zw

Follow Kendall on Twitter: https://twitter.com/KendallRoden
Follow Chloe on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChloeCondon
Follow Brandon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheCodeTraveler

Chloe Condon: 2:09

Hello, Brandon, it's Wednesday,

Brandon Minnick: 2:15

favorite day of the week. Good to see you again. Good to

Chloe Condon: 2:18

see ya. Oh my goodness, so much has happened in the last week. I'm so so excited. Before we get started though welcome y'all to eight bits, our weekly show where we interview really cool, interesting people in tech with the same seven questions and an eight bonus question every week. I'm Chloe Condon cloud advocate at Microsoft. And this is

Brandon Minnick: 2:42

Brandon, also a developer advocate at Microsoft. And, Chloe, I am very excited today, because I feel like we have breaking news for the show. And that is the surface duo has just announced their release date. It's coming you can I think you can buy it today. Oh my god,

Unknown: 3:03

right.

Chloe Condon: 3:04

I think you're doing it. I'm so excited. I of course, I am an Android gal myself, as evidenced from this lovely phone case that I have, with my favorite character feeling how I feel all the time. I'm so excited to just walk around and open it like a book and be like Belle from Beauty. Oh, Isn't this amazing? I'm

Unknown: 3:27

excited about

Brandon Minnick: 3:28

with this phone. Oh, man. Well, it's a mixed bag of emotions. Because as a mobile app developer, this is yet another screen format or screen size that we have to now think about going forward. Right? So what I'm interested in the most in is getting one to try out and literally just run my apps on it, see how they look. And then seeing what it takes to modify them to be even better. And I've seen I know on the Xamarin side, we we've created a library for dual screens. months ago might have been about a year ago. Who knows time is not real anymore. You can tell by this long flowing hair how long we've been in quarantine,

Chloe Condon: 4:16

what is today?

Brandon Minnick: 4:19

But uh, yes, I've seen some cool demos that will take your code and almost tweak it just a little bit. So like things like menus, like those flyout menus. Sure, that will just always be there on the second screen. So it frees up more real estate for you on the other screen for what you're actually engaging with the app. So yeah, I really want to get one and try it out. I'm kind of hoping we could like get a free one. You know, like, this is my job Microsoft right? You can.

Chloe Condon: 4:48

This is our subtle This is the hashtag ad No, just kidding. Um, no, I'm super excited to because I don't know what it is. But maybe it's just that we're were of the same age Brandon, we grew up with those like sidekick phones that like opened up. And I remember blackberry for a long time just to get a full keyboard and it looked like a camera and it opened like this. And it like it was I love. I remember this open. I mean, we have the flip phone, of course, but shout out to my dad and his flip phone. But I'm so excited that almost have this little like book to walk around and read with. But that's a great point, like as far as mobile development is concerned, it will not only solve some interesting issues, but also create some really interesting UI things that we really haven't experienced yet.

Brandon Minnick: 5:38

Yeah. And I kind of think about it was that Nintendo handheld that has the screen like dual screens, and there's like a screen on the bottom where Yes, you can see like a map. Yeah. So like you could be playing in like, maybe you're walking through a castle, but the map of the castle is on the bottom screen. So you always have that extra information. And that's kind of how I see this going, like, maybe one will be a main screen will be more of an informational screen. But then yeah, the app developers who can really harness this and take advantage of it and make that second screen super meaningful, are just going to be lightyears ahead in the market. And the rest of us are just gonna be playing catch up.

Chloe Condon: 6:18

For as a crafty clean myself, I'm very excited to make a cover for it that looks like a tiny little book. Maybe I'll make like the Beatles, like handbook for the recently deceased or something. So it just looks like I'm walking around with my little book all the time. Yeah, so excited for that. I just like any new technology, I'm just like, please give it to us. So put your orders in today. All I will be doing that as soon as I get off this live stream, and any other fun things you want to share before we bring on our awesome guest today, Brandon.

Brandon Minnick: 6:53

For the that was my big one. How about you anything? Oh, wow.

Chloe Condon: 6:59

Wow. I'm so so excited. So I have been working with these incredibly smart kids. And I say kids, because they're high schoolers that make me a nice, young adult. We've been working on these really fantastic Azure projects over they did this really fun boot camp, that's called bit project. And it's a little program called a bit camp. And we will be dropping a URL here. But you can check it out at tiny URL comm slash bit Azure. And basically, they have been making these Azure Functions based projects. Some of them are using the Microsoft base API. There's some projects that use the Spotify API and Azure Functions to take a photo of you, and then tell you what playlist you should play based on what mood your image is, or, okay, we have one, one student from scratch. And if you've ever worked with hardware before, and IoT devices before, you know how difficult this is, made a heart rate monitor that will text you an alert when your heart rate goes over a certain amount, just really cool, awesome, innovative projects. And this Thursday, the link below is for the live stream link, they're going to be presenting their final projects. And I am so so excited because in this age of working from home, it's a really fun not only have these, these kids learn to remotely and just most of them have never even touched any sort of API's before, or this is one of their first or second computer science classes. But the project we made are so freakin cool. And I'm so excited for them to share them with the world. And I will be sharing a blog post with y'all next week featuring all the amazing things, but I feel like such a proud

Brandon Minnick: 8:44

it's such a it's a testament to like, and maybe inspiration is a better word. Because if somebody who has never done this before, was able to do it and do it successfully, then it's kind of like what's my excuse?

Chloe Condon: 9:00

Right? I mean, I am truly blown out of the water by these projects. And what's been really incredible is not only them sharing, like what they built but also sharing their process. So not only have they had to put together these these projects and build these projects, they made documentation super easy to have no learning how to present. So I've been working with them on their public speaking skills. But just to hear a high school student building their first project share with the group like I wanted to throw my computer across the room and this tutorial took me three days to go through to figure out I'm like we've all been there. Congratulations. Here's your engineering badge like so it's been really wonderful to just watch them learn some of them didn't even know what an API was. They had to like it was before it started. So I'm very proud and I will be hosting. It's almost like it feels like a graduation almost hosting their their celebratory project presentations on Thursday. So keep an eye out for that I tune in. It'll be up There may or may not be some costumes props. Last time there was a foil tinfoil hat. So who knows what'll happen laughs But we have extra special guests today on eight butts. Brandon, are you ready? Should we dive? Alrighty, so our guest today is the super amazing, talented, hilarious. We will share her Instagram and everywhere. Kendall.

Unknown: 10:27

Thank you

Chloe Condon: 10:30

so much for the lovely folks at home. Of course we know who you are. But tell the lovely humans at home. You are what you do with us here at Microsoft.

Kendall Roden: 10:39

Yeah, sounds good. Also just want to add in some things. So when I first joined Microsoft, I came through the college hire program. And we did something very similar to that project. But we actually use Xamarin. Brandon, which is I use Xamarin I'm gonna be honest. It was like a notification system that would connect to your Microsoft band. So that's the first time I feel like, yeah, definitely aging myself at least. So Hi, everyone. My name is Kendall Roden. This is the first time I've done with these live shows. So bear with me, I'm probably a little nervous. But yeah, so I started at Microsoft four years ago, graduated from the University of Alabama, roll tide, got to get that in there. And essentially started out as a consultant in the Apps domain. So really working with customers directly to just write code. So lots of C sharp API development on my end. And then I switched into a group called premier support. And so I did a lot of education around cloud native topics, things like Kubernetes, and containers, and app modernization on Azure. And then, for the past year, I've been a cloud native technical specialist on the global blackbelt team. So it's a super neat roll, definitely learning a lot. It's a big transition from where I started, but working a lot with customers to do application design sessions, trying to help them configure applications to take advantage of all that Azure has to offer. Don't ask me what cloud native is because I promise you, you'll get you'll get an answer that you may or may not agree with. I think it's the most overloaded thing right now in tech, one of the biggest buzzwords, but no, I really love working with customers a lot around Kubernetes. So I've learned a lot a lot from a technical perspective since I joined Microsoft.

Chloe Condon: 12:20

So two important questions today. Okay, first of all, I tweeted this last week, but I would love to know your answer. Do you know how much sugar or carbs are in a Kubernetes? cluster? Because it sounds like really yummy. But I'm watching my carb intake. So that's question number one. And number two is, what is what like, what does it mean to be a black belt at Microsoft? For those who don't know?

Kendall Roden: 12:44

Yeah, so two great questions. I will say that for most, most people, I would say maybe steer away from Kubernetes, if you're not willing to, you know, take on a lot of overhead and a lot of time and effort. Because it is it is quite a beast, I definitely think it's a fun conversation to have with customers really about getting into Kubernetes, just because there's a lot to consider.

Chloe Condon: 13:05

It's a dark hole of information. It's a twisty black hole of so many things.

Kendall Roden: 13:10

But in terms of being a global black belt, a lot of what I get when I first talk to people is Oh, are you like six sigma certified? Is it something that has to do with with that? And the answer is no. So basically, what a what a global blackbelt is at Microsoft is we're we're deeply, deeply technical. That's kind of our goal. And we're trying to win the technical decision on Azure. So we have various pillars that we cover, whether it be like VMware solutions on Azure, open source databases on Azure, we cover networking, but our team specifically on cloud native, we cover a lot around like how do we do day to operations on some of these technologies that may be a little bit more complex, or the field doesn't necessarily have that level of scaling, or the ability to be that specific on some of these technologies, just because of the breadth of Azure. And then I would also say another component is, you know, working with a product group, trying to get feedback directly from what our largest enterprise customers are doing. And and simultaneously like fieldfield, skilling so like how do we take some of these incubating technologies like dapper is a big one, we focused a lot of effort on and actually find a way that we can scale some of the dapper knowledge while it's still incubating. So that as customers have questions, we're we're able to feel those early on. So yeah, that's what a global black belt is, at least from my perspective. Sure, my manager with over a decade of what we do, but Fun fact,

Brandon Minnick: 14:34

I used to be a mobile global blackbelt first landed after the acquisition, like we have all these mobile experts, where do we put them on the blackbelt team? And I was like, sounds cool to me.

Kendall Roden: 14:46

Yeah, I think. I think there are a few team on my team that did come from Xamarin. I don't know if you know, Roberto Cervantes, but he's on. So he's on the cloud native team, and so he came from Xamarin as well.

Chloe Condon: 15:02

Do you actually get a real blackball? When you join the bar?

Kendall Roden: 15:06

You don't, but you get these cool t shirts. So Joey schlechter after shout out to him, he made this T shirt it says, like the lightning on the back, still not 100 with me. We also have Yeah, we got we have a little like Microsoft global black belt sticker. And it's just like the Microsoft logo and it has a little black belt on it. So it's kind of cute

Chloe Condon: 15:30

to ask, because I always ask the Imagine Cup Winners, I'm like, Did you get a cup? Like I need to know like, what the actual prizes are for these accomplishments.

Kendall Roden: 15:40

Just you know, a nice sticker and a good pat on the back.

Chloe Condon: 15:45

Very fun. Well, I am super, super stoked to jump into these questions with you. Specifically, for one reason that I won't know spoilers at all, but it may or may not involve a spaceship looking thing. But are you what kind of fun things are you working on these days at Microsoft, anything you want to kind of plug or share with the viewers at home? And also, feel free to drop your questions y'all in the chat wherever it is, depending on if it's twitch or YouTube or wherever it is. And we won't answer them on the air. But yeah, Kendall, what have you been working on these days?

Kendall Roden: 16:16

Yeah, great question. So the interesting thing about our team is that we hop around a lot. So we're not necessarily engaged on a particular customer or a particular area within cloud native, it's kind of just whatever comes through. And so I would say, you know, for the past, probably three months, it's been a little bit of a, you know, we've taken a little bit bit of a break, because we kind of reached a good point. But like I said, one of the things that I got really excited about was the dapper stuff, just because I think it solves a lot of the issues within the cloud native ecosystem that we're trying to solve with like service mesh, and we want mutual TLS between all of our, you know, multiple microservices now that we're going into this distributed environment. And so I really like the promise of what dapper can provide to developers to like, it's really developer centric. And so we basically built out a, you know, almost like an open hack. So if you've ever, you know, gone through Microsoft open hack, it's a really good opportunity to get hands on and go through challenge based opportunities to kind of learn a technology at different levels. And so we built out something similar for dapper. And so it was really cool getting to do that, we got to actually kind of present what we were working on to Mark russinovich, which has been like a big goal of mine, since I joined Microsoft was to even get him to, to wave at me, you know. So the fact that we got to, you know, talk to him a little bit about some of the investment we were putting in there. So definitely, that we're definitely, you know, incubating a lot around service meshes right now. So one of the cool internal things that I've been working on in collaboration with Tommy felgo, who's a CSA or cloud solution architect, and a couple of other people from the open source side of Microsoft, we've worked on this thing called Cloud Native hack hours. So what we do there is basically we find, you know, technologies, be it the various service meshes like hashey Corp console service on Azure, which is kind of, I think about to be GA. And we basically help skill up Microsoft internals. So we bring people in either from hashey Corp, or from data dog, various open source providers, or even just, you know, ecosystem partners within Kubernetes. And we, and we kind of organize a hack for that. And so that's been a fun thing I've been doing but other than that, just, you know, traditional architecture reviews, lots of good logic apps in there integration scenarios. Definitely event driven functions, you know, it spans quite a wide array. So you sound

Unknown: 18:33

busy, you do all that. Fun. Yeah,

Kendall Roden: 18:37

we're tomorrow, I have a cool opportunity to do a dev sec Ops, kind of, you know, it's like a DevOps day for a customer. And so we're doing a presentation on kind of modern dev sec ops. So yeah, it's, it's fun. I like that. I'm always learning something new. And I like that. It's never, you know, one specific technology area, but it can be hard to keep up sometimes.

Chloe Condon: 18:56

Lots of balls in the air at sea. Yeah, exactly. Very fun. Well, and also, before we get started, I feel like we met originally, because you had a podcast and we chatted on there. We met through the interwebs. And is so funny, y'all. Fans on social media follow this very funny lady. But yeah, I'm trying to remember we we met in person to record your podcast. Oh, my gosh, there's almost two years ago,

Kendall Roden: 19:28

it seems shocking. Yeah, it was two years ago cuz I was still in Charlotte. But I was obviously like, most of the people listening had a huge girl crush on Chloe and thought was so cool. And I think the, you know, the cloud Developer Advocate role is just a really neat role. And so I remember pinning Cynthia crane, one of my co hosts and was like, Hey, we should get Chloe to come on the Azure podcast and do a special for International Women's Day. And so I think Cynthia and you actually met up in the San Francisco office. Yeah, okay.

Chloe Condon: 20:00

Back in the day, back in the day, yeah. So

Kendall Roden: 20:05

back when we didn't live work, breathe and sleep.

Chloe Condon: 20:11

And we'll link to that podcast episode. Are y'all still doing that podcast?

Kendall Roden: 20:16

Still plugging and chugging on the Azure podcast? So yeah, just we actually had our Azure podcast co host summit, which sounds really official. It was just a one hour meeting on Monday, where we kind of just assessed the direction in the podcast, but yeah, I think we're up to you know, mid five, hundreds of episodes mid mid 500. Episode. Yeah, so lots of fun stuff. So yeah, there's no plan on on slowing that train down. So if you want to check that out, it's easy. podcast.com. But yeah, we'll link that as well. But I think we're, we're up to like 10,000, I think across all platforms. So yeah, we've got a good number of subscribers and active listeners, which is exciting to see it take off that way.

Chloe Condon: 20:55

Brandon, I'm like looking to the wrong way. Do you think we'll ever reach that file, but Congrats, that's

Kendall Roden: 21:06

got to give a major shout out to you know, my five five other co hosts, specifically like sujeet demello, who started the podcast and, and I just got to you know, be privy to his greatness, because he pulled me in so very grateful for the opportunity. So much fun.

Chloe Condon: 21:19

We will link that below. Definitely check it out. You can check out vintage, early Microsoft Chloe on that show.

Kendall Roden: 21:26

Yeah.

Chloe Condon: 21:29

Well, Shall we get started with the eight bits question? plural. Lissa, let's dive in y'all. So Kendall, I'm super, super excited. In particular, for one of these questions, which I will I've done a lot of them. But we'll start out with our very first question, Kendall, which is what is your earliest memory attack?

Kendall Roden: 21:55

Okay, so I took notes because I was like, kind of brainstorming when I got keys and was thinking about it because I don't have world's best memory. So I was like, What is my earliest memory attack, and then the floodgates open and I have like a million so. So yeah, I actually remember we, when I was growing up, we had a my dad had a study, and it had, you know, just like a clunky desktop computer. And I remember he I think he used to do MS DOS like I'm pretty sure I remember my dad writing some dos commands back in the day. I had no idea what that meant. But we played the heck out of these Barbies CD ROM games. Yes. Did you ever play that? Yes, Barbie fashion designer. It was a Barbies. Mert. Like it was like it wasn't like a murder mystery. But it was like a carnival mystery thing. And there'd be like a shady man like an all black and you'd have to go find him like hiding around the carnival. And then there was also Barbie Dreamhouse, which was like probably one of my, my favorite games. So we have like a bunch of games we would play on there. And then I also remember I had this Quantum Leap pad. And it's like this clunky it looks kind of like a book. So surface duo vibes obviously. And you would open it up and then you would put these fillers in. So they had like second to fifth grade. They had like fifth grade or sixth grade. And it would be different topics like muscles, bones of the body, it would be like geographic regions. So I remember I would click on a particular place and it wouldn't have a name and it would be like a lot of roofs. I remember it used to be like that's how I like learned basically all of the European countries was playing on that quantum leap pad. Oh my Yeah, so those are probably my earliest two I wrote like I love obviously Nintendo 64 was always really fun thing. You know, video games. I went through the whole like, they'll talk about the Nintendo DS had one of those had a PSP. And then I was obsessed with the sidekick, so that was more like probably Middle School. But I wanted a sidekick so bad.

Chloe Condon: 23:49

First of all, one of my favorite meme call outs of our generation is that Kelly Rowland in her music video is texting someone through an Excel document on her side. We'll link to that in the show notes. I love technology so much. Brandon, if you're not familiar, Barbie fashion designer was innovation in technology because you designed your own Barbie clothes in the game. And then you could print them on this paper that was sticky on one side and you cut it a certain way. You could actually affect these outfits arm to Barbie. Like it was basically 3d printing before it was just

Brandon Minnick: 24:27

fun to say that. That's really impressive.

Chloe Condon: 24:31

Yeah, and it would break your printer all the time. We get really upset because like the stickies I would get on the printer but it was 100% worth it and you got the color. If you didn't have a color printer asked me I know. They gave you pens to color in the clothes.

Brandon Minnick: 24:46

That's the color.

Kendall Roden: 24:47

Yeah, no, it was it was so fun. I remember. I did a lot of like playing life because I would go to my aunt's house. And they have like the game of life on their computer. So we would play that too. But yeah, computer games, sir. Those days, so fun. And I, I remember every time it reminded me of what we talked about before the show, but every time I would log into the Barbie game, it would go welcome. Tyndale, like, you know how to my name. And so for me, and my family called me, they were like,

Chloe Condon: 25:16

one thing that I do appreciate about just the advancement and innovation of technology is computers are much better able to pronounce Chloe now. My early computer games, it was a lot of slow or like, slow flow. I had a lot of early childhood education, theater games, where you would write out a script and then the URL, what would now be the Cortana or Siri voice would go like, Hello, welcome to the play. And having been studios recently engineering at goat Inc. You know, like, we've come so far we've come so far with NLP and pronounciation I'm surprised with Kendall though.

Kendall Roden: 26:00

I know I don't even know why it's not like there wasn't even like da le but it you know, it wasn't there yet. So we always bring it up. kendale remember, like the days of like, mini clip was that it's like, Do you remember that? There was like, it was like a mini could you plug I can't remember if it was associated with it. Or something. But yeah, you it was like little key chains that had like a little boot like a mini boombox, and like a tiny mini clip and it would play like a 15 second, you know, clip from Britney Spears, like which I didn't get or like the atomic bomb, you know, all of that stuff.

Brandon Minnick: 26:33

So to pay like$5 for that 15 second clip clips.

Kendall Roden: 26:39

Click Yes.

Chloe Condon: 26:40

Yeah, girl in my tap dance class had the Mariah Carey is All I want for Christmas.

Kendall Roden: 26:45

That's what it was called hit clip. Mini clip was the the website I used to go to to play like crypto.

Brandon Minnick: 26:51

Also good. Yeah, man.

Chloe Condon: 26:53

Wow. Remember, I remember when we used to play music on tiny little boom boxes the size of our fist.

Kendall Roden: 27:01

I kind of miss those days. That was fun. I kind of missed the days of like this, the CD player where you'd walk around the neighborhood with like your blue CD player. Like I'm just gonna go get a nice walk.

Brandon Minnick: 27:12

Skip protection, though. Oh, yeah. jumping around 62nd GPS that's

Chloe Condon: 27:19

watching us or like

Unknown: 27:22

getting old?

Chloe Condon: 27:23

Well, I think that'll be a fun IoT projects that you you and I can make him but we can make a mini clip. Yeah. Now we have a next question. All right, y'all. This is the one I've been leading up to? What is the last piece of tech or hardware that you bought?

Kendall Roden: 27:40

Okay, so I'm not like 100% proud of this. So kind of hard. And also kind of simultaneously not too bad. Okay. Well, good. I'm glad to have your support. So I have a cat and his name is coda, he's walking around somewhere. And he like I've always had an automatic litter box pretty much since I got him just because I travel for work all the time. And I just like, generally don't want to have to deal with that on a daily basis. So it's really nice. But there's just not I think that there's a big gap in the market for like great cat toys. Like I have like a decent cat tree. You can actually see I don't know which side I'm on. I have a decent cat tree. But there's not a lot of good pack for automatic litter boxes. So I had one for three years. It was sufficient. But then I was like, Okay, I need to get another one. I need to replace it because this one's getting old. And there was like really no good reviews for any of them. And I kept getting these Instagram ads for the litter robots. And I was like, ooh, what is the litter robot? So I click on it, and it is literally a space capsule. I mean,

Chloe Condon: 28:44

I saw your Instagram story. And I was like, and I need this.

Kendall Roden: 28:51

It's like it's scary. I mean, it literally looks I mean, it's a giant so it came in this box. I was like at least six feet tall. Probably. Maybe that's okay. Five, five to six feet tall. It had to have been. And so yeah, it's in this closet over here in my house. I'm not going to show you just because like who wants to see that actually. But yeah, Chloe knows because I posted a bunch of Instagram stories about it. But it was $550 so it's a steep price, but honestly, it's so cool. So basically like put the litter in it right? It's like a spaceship. It's a spaceship. It has lights inside of

Brandon Minnick: 29:25

it. I'm talking about Dragon capsule, Apollo capsule,

Chloe Condon: 29:29

like a pod, a pod

Kendall Roden: 29:32

relaxation pods. That's like a big

Chloe Condon: 29:34

Yeah, like a float deprivation tank for your cat.

Kendall Roden: 29:38

That's it. That's it. And so so yeah, Kota was scared to use it at first, which I was like, if I paid $550 for something he's not gonna, what am I even gonna do with myself. And it's also way too big to send back like I'm like, Good, good. Try telling me I can send this back for free. I can't even you know, lift it up with Batman. So the litter basically the way it works, it's really cool. So the whole thing spins and it puts all of the It grates through all the litter. And then it basically puts all the litter out clumps up the other stuff, drops it in a little bin that's underneath the system, and then flows all the litter back in. So it does like this two minute cycle to basically optimize on litter usage. And the drawer you technically only have to like replace maybe once a week with a with a cat. And so it's like in a really good system and it's awesome but

Chloe Condon: 30:25

a minute long because your cat to space. Exactly.

Kendall Roden: 30:29

Like one second the cat was in it and then something zapped and it was gone. And I don't know what it is. He's probably floating What is it called the the place Diagon Alley Yeah.

Chloe Condon: 30:44

It is the coolest look I've ever seen. It makes me want to have a cat just to train it to go in there and launch it in into space.

Kendall Roden: 30:54

The next step is getting him to use the toilet but I need more than one bathroom. I have live in a small apartment but I'm like when I have more than one bathroom. He's there's a whole system of training your cat to use the toilet. So that's step that's step three, I guess to whatever so Brandon, do

Chloe Condon: 31:09

you have any high tech dog things in your life? Because I feel like there's so many tasks with I don't have an animal myself. I just have a toy skeleton that I bring out and have fun with. Oh yeah, I shouldn't make some outfits for him. But I feel like there's so many tasks that either can be like automated by technology I guess like other than getting a robot to walk your dog Brandon. Any technical innovations you have or you want for your pet

Brandon Minnick: 31:40

I don't even know if this counts but we have automated dog food shipments on Amazon so just like once a month we get a bag of dog food which is nice. And then I I use like calendar reminders to remember to give him the once a month pills for heartworm flea and tick stuff, but that

Chloe Condon: 32:01

sounds like a good as your friends. Yeah.

Brandon Minnick: 32:04

Yeah, I think we have any like crazy. Even anything electronic that Kerber uses I mean, he just he eats everything. Like if we get him a plush toy, and things just shredded the stuffings everywhere within hours. So yeah, I don't know. If we spent hundreds of dollars on a high tech piece of equipment. For now,

Chloe Condon: 32:27

I'm sure you're gonna get a bunch of targeted ads. But I do not have a pet. But I've seen a wearable like something that put on the leash that takes pictures, I guess a little different now because we're all working from home. But it would like every hour or so like, take a picture. So you could like see what your pet was seeing at home. Like a smart wearable device for your dog. Although I feel like having had a dog before my dog would eat it. Then I see the inside of its stomach through the power of

Kendall Roden: 32:58

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, have like a cool piece of tech to add there. So I don't know if it's I'm a lazy owner. And so I've automated everything. But I'm really just dedicated but I have like automatic pet feeder, automatic, you know, I have like a water fountain that like regenerates the water. But then I also have a pet cube. I don't know if you've ever heard of those. But it doesn't mean similar. I mean, it's a basically it's a webcam for your for your animal. And so it like detects if there is like meows or if there's barks or if there's movement, and it's really cool, because you can actually go on there and communicate through it. So whenever I'm traveling, I can go on see what code is doing, and talk to him. And also it has a laser pointer so I can actually calibrate it. Virtually so like I'm in

Chloe Condon: 33:44

you're gonna automate yourself out of the picture. I know. I know. I am

Kendall Roden: 33:47

irrelevant in

Brandon Minnick: 33:49

that picture. You just picture the laser pointer coming out of the spaceship. Oh, Wally. Yeah. Like while he's chasing around the laser pointer.

Chloe Condon: 34:00

Oh, my goodness. We have some people in the chat saying Brandon no ball launcher. There's there's a there's automated ball launchers. But Brandon Brandon could do that.

Brandon Minnick: 34:09

Okay, got one right here.

Chloe Condon: 34:14

All righty. Next question is what technology Do you love candle?

Kendall Roden: 34:20

This is a hard question to ask a techie because I wrote down like 10 things. But yeah, so I would say I tried to think of some creative ones. And like some that were day to day, I guess. So I'm going to tell you all my three favorite apps and then I'll go into like my two favorite, I guess technologies outside of that. So one of my favorite apps is the one second everyday app. And basically what it is, I don't know if you have ever heard of it, but it makes it really easy from a user interface perspective to upload a one second video from each day of the year.

Chloe Condon: 34:50

These are so fun to watch back especially I've seen a lot of folks with kids.

Kendall Roden: 34:56

Yes, like charts, you know their growth over time. So it was my new year's resolution. In 2018, so as of December 31, I will have three years worth of one seconds every day. So, yeah, I just think it's really special. It's especially for people who, you know, you look back and wonder where the time is gone and what you've done. And then you watch it happen and play out and you realize, like, wow, I accomplished a lot. I met a lot of people, I went through heartbreak I met, you know, you know, all these different things. It's really, really cool. And so that's probably my favorite app.

Chloe Condon: 35:28

And I missed any days or every day.

Kendall Roden: 35:32

So I would say like, on average per year, I've missed like, 10 to 12 days. So like, so pretty good. Yeah, there's some days where I realize like, it'll be like, I'm sick, or especially when COVID started, you know, when you're navigating all this stuff, you're like, Okay, here's a picture of my food. You know, there's some things that it was like, there was a few days where I was like, I just don't have anything to share today.

Chloe Condon: 35:52

Like a bowl of granola.

Kendall Roden: 35:57

Excitement, yeah, my mic my working computer for the 12th day in a row. But so yeah, I really love that. I also love this game called design home, it's kind of sickening, because I spend real money on it. But you get to design rooms. But the cool thing is they actually use real pieces from real companies, and they virtualized them. So like, if you like something in the game, you could actually go buy it in real life, which I think is cool, which is not why I like it. I just like it because it's super fun. Yeah, I got an animal

Chloe Condon: 36:25

crossing because there's like a teacup ride that I really want in real life on the island, and I need to buy it immediately.

Kendall Roden: 36:35

For sure. And then the last one is Spotify. I think the technology behind Spotify is discover weekly is a really amazing example of using things like machine learning and like creating recommendation engines that bring people joy, because every single week my discover weekly is spot on and so I love that don't have to go search for music like good music comes to me which I really appreciate things Spotify,

Brandon Minnick: 36:57

big shout out. You're so lucky. I I use a YouTube Music, okay, because we pay for YouTube premiums and just included so I could pay for Spotify too, but already getting this for free. And yeah, just play the same songs for me every time and like, I know, I've liked this song like I give it a thumbs up a week ago. But you'd have to play it every single day. Every time I turn on the playlist. Hopefully they'll get better

Chloe Condon: 37:24

Huey Lewis in the news every day and holiday notes. Have either of y'all. Well, I guess you haven't Brandon. But my boyfriend has signed us up for the Spotify duo account, which you sign up for with either a friend or someone you're in a relationship for. And what's been very funny. I've enjoyed this a lot more than my boyfriend. But first of all, there was there's some UI where you can go in and upload a photo of yourself and your partner that you share it with. So ours is like a picture of us. It's like two sticks with fondue on it and we're cheese. And then it says like Chloe and pies playlist. Yeah, the funny part is I like and upvote things a lot more on Spotify than my boyfriend does. So this combined playlist of our similar interest is like one death metal song obviously has. And then ru Paul 80s throwback music and it's like, this is your love song playlist and my Chloe's playlist. But it's been a really fun feature to play with. And then also just seeing these high school students, one of them made the take a photo, and it'll recommend a playlist for you feature with the Spotify API, and I'm so excited to get my hands on it. recommendation.

Kendall Roden: 38:37

I love that. Yeah, that's awesome. Um, yeah, that's gonna be the next argument that couples have. It's like this waitlist is really happening.

Brandon Minnick: 38:46

How many videos Did you like today?

Chloe Condon: 38:48

Right. I don't know if y'all ever run into this. But if you if you share an apartment with someone and you have some of these smart devices in your home, I will often say like, okay, blank, play whatever song and sometimes it won't register whose voice it is. And then my boyfriend will get recommendations for very specific Broadway musicals that he did not want to learn about football

Brandon Minnick: 39:14

such as becoming a well rounded person that's Yeah, he

Chloe Condon: 39:17

loves love students on time he loves musical theater. I'm so that is so so cool that you have this like, you know, you were saying about this this application with the one second video thing what a cool memory to be able to like, like I think we sometimes scroll through our use things like timehop and our Instagram feed and we kind of reminisce but I love this idea of like a visual. I've tried to do that on a couple vacations, but I want to copy you and do that just for my day to day. Yeah, I

Kendall Roden: 39:47

mean, it just makes it easier. And it's cool too. Because if you you know if you forget to fill in for a few weeks, you can actually do like autofill so it'll just go through your your camera roll and kind of like assigned videos as it thinks. whichever one it thinks fits best. And so yeah, I highly recommend That, and every year it's so fun because my family gets so excited to watch it. So we like play it on Christmas Eve. Just because it like they're, you know, they're all featured in it. And it's always fun that my friends, you know, seeing my friendships that have evolved over time and seeing somebody that was in it three years ago and it's still there now. It's really really cool. But But yeah, so I'll now I'm just going to rapid fire three things that I think everyone should invest in based on their their desire. So one is a projector. So like, I don't have a TV. I just have a projector and it's life changing. I absolutely love it. I've had it for like, three or four years now. But yeah, love, love the projector and never going back to a TV. Obviously Azure just have to throw that in there. And then muscle gun. Yeah. If you're somebody that's always like, I'm so sorry, massage if you get a muscle gun, or you have a friend that has a muscle gun in my case, the guy that I've been dating has a muscle gun. So I have borrowed it and it is life changing. And if you play golf, getting a rangefinder, so like one of the hardest things is always trying to figure out how far you are from the flag. And so having just like an automated handheld rangefinder is awesome, because it will tell you exactly how far you are from the pin. So those are like three kind of more obscure ones.

Chloe Condon: 41:14

I'm like, and muscle gun right down.

Kendall Roden: 41:19

I don't I'm not I'm not like, like I'm not a physical therapist, so I don't want to say that that's your body. I don't really know

Chloe Condon: 41:27

that you were saying a muscle gun from the gunshot. So good. Okay, so stop now for something completely different.

Unknown: 41:37

Um,

Chloe Condon: 41:38

what technology Do you hate?

Kendall Roden: 41:41

This one? Or this one for me?

Unknown: 41:42

Yeah.

Kendall Roden: 41:44

What do y'all hate? Y'all have like really came up with a couple but

Chloe Condon: 41:48

so mine I believe and correct me if I'm wrong, Brandon was I hate anything where you can anonymize yourself on the internet. Because I think like, it's important to have an open discussion, but I think people should have accountability for what they say on the interwebs. Brandon, I don't remember yours. Do you remember?

Unknown: 42:07

Back in the archives,

Brandon Minnick: 42:08

my love was C sharp. This is true. I love it. But uh, so my hate was the opposite end of the spectrum. So basically, say non strongly typed programming languages, where it just feels like the Wild West did it like breaks my brain to think about how you can make apps without bugs. ecosystems like, like, the compiler saves me so much in C sharp saves me from myself. And I know I'm just constantly shooting myself in the foot if I didn't have it.

Kendall Roden: 42:40

I'm a big fan of C sharp, but that's also because it's the one that like I, you know, learned in school and that I've used the Actually,

Brandon Minnick: 42:47

it's the best.

Kendall Roden: 42:50

Yeah, so the what I put two, so one is I, I really love like bots. So I mean, I like Bot Framework and Azure, like I've loved how that has evolved, because I did a couple of blog posts when I first joined Microsoft. And so I'm kind of just now for writing back into that space, because we're getting seeing some more traction, just in our area. And so I'm a big fan of bots, but not bots that are not properly scoped. I hate getting a bot when I'm frustrated. So I feel like there's just some, there's a lot of considerations when it comes to like a bot should not be like an another person that handles everything, like it should have a scoped purpose. That should be really clear. And there should be a really good handoff. And so I think I really struggle when I get on a call and the bot does not understand me, I don't think I'm just like, the worst operator

Chloe Condon: 43:40

operator.

Kendall Roden: 43:45

Yeah, so I do really like bots, especially from a technical perspective thing. There's a lot of cool stuff there. But, you know, they have to be done well and thoughtfully from a user experience. And then, and then the other one is alarm clocks, specifically because I hate waking up. So

Chloe Condon: 44:03

that is relevant. There has been an alarm clock on my list for a long time that I haven't gotten that has wheels on it that like literally wheels itself off of your bedside table. I saw an Amazon review that this rolled off onto my face and I got a bloody nose. It woke me up though, and I was like, to be fair. But now I have one that I stand on. It's like it looks like a little mat and I have to stand on it for a certain amount of seconds for it to turn off. And I'm a kind of person who works with external accountability. So I know it'll wake up my boyfriend. But I did want to share a link for bought folks if you want to learn how to build an ethical chatbot that that satisfies and crosses all those T's and dotted those eyes. You can go to aka ms slash t i l about bots. So today I learned about bots and we'll share that in the show notes as well. And that is an amazing Microsoft learn module that our co workers Meet your maid that'll walk you through all of these things to consider when making it because I couldn't agree more it can be so annoying to just go in circles with a bot that's built to help you but then is like making you?

Brandon Minnick: 45:13

Yes,

Chloe Condon: 45:14

yeah, absolutely. Okay. Next one is what other profession would you want to attract?

Kendall Roden: 45:23

Yeah, so if I like, in thinking about that I, you know, I thought about a few things, but probably the number one is videography. So I, when I was in college, it was really cool, Chloe, you would have like, gotten such a kick out of this course. But there's this course at Alabama called documenting justice. And so you apply for the course. And basically, the whole first semester you study documentary film, you learn about kind of the more the, the the creation process, the analysis process of like, what was somebody's motivation when they created this? How did they know did they get proper consent was an ethical and it was all about, you know, we watched things by like Errol Morris and some of the big documentary filmmakers. And so it was really cool just learning about the process of documentary filmmaking and just Comment Commentary on that. And then the second semester was like, find something that's going on in Alabama, in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa that you that you feel like needs to be brought to light that has to do with like social injustice, and then make a film about it. So it was so cool. I don't think I've ever been that invested in anything in my whole life. So we went through the entire process of like, building out the the structure of the documentary, the content, figuring out who we wanted to interview was gonna be a part of it doing all of the post production, like after filming, so we would do all the editing ourselves. So it was me and this girl named Caitlin buck, who was a friend from Alabama. And so yeah, we did it on basically redlining, like the practice of discrimination in real estate and Birmingham, just because, you know, it was a topic that we kind of stumbled upon. And we found this old apartment complex that was like, essentially dilapidated. And we were like, What is this place? And so we went into basically doing almost like a eulogy of that apartment complex, because it was about to be torn down. So we talked to people that were like on city council, we talked to people who used to live in the building before it had kind of basically become, you know, in a state of where you couldn't even live it. It was an uninhabitable. And so it's called demolition by neglect. It's on YouTube, if you want to check it out. It's just 10 minutes long. But yeah, I just like fell in love with that. I think Premiere Pro is awesome technology. And so yeah, I'd probably be my number one.

Chloe Condon: 47:28

And it sounds like in that class, you got to learn like how to tell a story how to do it ethically, like what the processes are, I, I do truly think that everyone should have to take some sort of like storytelling or filmmaking class, if they go into computer science, because being able to explain, like having that level of understanding, I think is is so so important even in well, documentaries, but in documentation.

Kendall Roden: 47:52

No, it's so true. Because I feel like sometimes we miss the story for customers, we miss a story. Anytime that we're doing anything, we just put a bunch of content in a PowerPoint document, we you know, we present it and a lot of times it doesn't really tell a story to anybody. They're like, Okay, what does that mean? I need? I need more than that. And so I think it definitely helps from that perspective, too. So yeah, I love that. I think that'd be really, really cool.

Chloe Condon: 48:14

Yeah, so fun. Also, as a we are our producer on the show just said Whoo hoo for videography, couldn't agree more handclaps. So what technology would you not want to attempt? Yeah, so I was on fashion, not what technology,

Kendall Roden: 48:37

they're putting plenty of technologies that I like, I would not want to be a networking engineer, let's just put it that way. I'm not signing up for that. But so two of them are real, or one of the one of them is like more real and then one of them is a fake job that I just would never want to do. So I don't think I can be a teacher. So I love teaching. So like the TEALS program at Microsoft, if you've ever heard of it, I highly recommend looking that up, I'll even drop a link or, or something. But basically TEALS is an organization that helps Microsoft professionals or professionals in the IT industry to go and teach computer science at schools. And so I've done that, and I love I loved it. It was awesome. And it definitely everything you said earlier resonated, just like seeing someone seeing a student who says like, I'm so stupid, I'm never gonna be able to figure this out. And I was like, Girl, I was like, I felt the exact same way. And I was like, I promise you can do this. You know, I think a lot of people think you have to be super, super smart to learn how to code. And the reality is, it's it's just the thought process. It's just another thing to learn. I could not be in a classroom every day and be expected to be there on time. I just wouldn't it would work. Like I couldn't do it. I just you know, I like vacation. It's hard to plan there. I love that Microsoft, you know, I have flexibility in my schedule. I like to travel. And so I think just being in the same classroom every day, at the same time, I wouldn't be able to adhere to that standard. And so that's why I said Peter. Yeah,

Chloe Condon: 49:58

it's so interesting because we had a guest a week or two ago who has who's a teacher learning to become a developer, so relatable to teachers?

Kendall Roden: 50:08

Honestly, I yeah, I have so much respect for people that have that kind of like, regimented schedule. I just never, especially when you start at Microsoft, it's like four years later, if I couldn't, you know, I have friends that are like, Oh, yeah, we're, you know, getting hauled back to work post COVID. Like, we're not allowed to work from home anymore. And I'm like, I just can't imagine having that, you know, responsibility put on me to be somewhere everyday at a certain time. And then the second one is a jewelry on tingler. Like, if that was a dog, I wouldn't do

Unknown: 50:36

it. It's so good to what the honor that wouldn't do

Chloe Condon: 50:38

that is so relatable Kendall and I believe this is either in my tweet draft or have tweeted this before. I am waiting for a woman in tech to invent the jewelry on tangler I will buy as much money as you paid for that cat litter box. to just have someone untangle my jewelry. I've

Brandon Minnick: 50:58

like headphones cords. Yeah. It's just like you put them in the box. And they're tangled. Yeah, just inside. So like, you put it in the box. They become

Chloe Condon: 51:10

like a robot with little like tweezer hands to just take apart these little tiny these thin little necklace chains are the bane of my existence. I could not agree more.

Kendall Roden: 51:19

It reminds me of she's the man when she's like you were leaving a really tangled web. Really, really painful. But yeah, I just couldn't do it. So I'm saving all my tangled jewelry. And it's going to be the punishment for my kids in the future. Like, not grounded, but you have to untangle that whole thing from like, glory and come back when you've learned a lesson. Someone in the chat just said like Christmas lights.

Chloe Condon: 51:40

So anybody out there watching tangler bought for us. I mean, I saw a video robot the other day robot cheerleaders at a Japanese baseball game, I believe. So where's the jewelry? I'm Taylor. And our next question, what technology Do you wish existed from film or TV?

Unknown: 52:03

Okay,

Kendall Roden: 52:03

so I have some really specific going,

Chloe Condon: 52:07

Hey, we're here for it.

Kendall Roden: 52:08

We love about her. Have you ever seen Spy Kids? A long time ago? Yeah. Okay, familiar. So they have these cool. So they go to the safe house when their you know, their family's been compromised. Our parents are spies, they find out. And so the Spy Kids go off to the safe house. And as they possibly have these little packs, like imagine it's like a vacuum sealed plastic card, basically. And so you look at it and you're like, it would maybe be yellow and red. And they would put it in the microwave and it would zap into a McDonald's meal.

Chloe Condon: 52:40

So that's cool. Yeah, yes. down now.

Kendall Roden: 52:45

Yeah. Like it was so cool. And there was other things in that movie like flips googlies and there was like the thumbs and the thumbs and they had like mini micro like, mini cameras that they would put up and then they would like have a Yeah, anyways, the Spy Kids were super dope and had so many cool things that I wanted, but that microwave thing really hit home. That's like

Chloe Condon: 53:06

food. I'm like, please sign me up.

Kendall Roden: 53:10

Yeah, we need to you need to watch the clip because it is really like once you see it, you'll be like, Yes, I need one of those. The other one is that I had is like the closet and clueless I feel like every girl at some point has wanted that. You know the concept of being able to have all and I feel like people have tried to do it like they've tried to say hey, let's archive all of the clothes that you have. And then you can click through on your iPhone and put together outfits But no, I needed like that one that exactly. We need a

Chloe Condon: 53:39

touch screen next to the closet. That could be an interesting inventory like create a clothing inventory that has some sort of like Bluetooth beacons in it to know what you're wearing and what you're not putting that on the list of side projects.

Kendall Roden: 53:55

Yeah, so I like we need that. Chloe, get that done. Ah,

Chloe Condon: 53:58

I'm on it. I'm on it. I feel I'll just use my Barbie fashion designer. Yeah, I love those answers. I actually just watched clueless again recently. I think they just celebrated a little anniversary.

Kendall Roden: 54:15

Yes, backup over top of Netflix I saw yesterday.

Chloe Condon: 54:18

Had to give it another wash love a vintage Paul Rudd

Brandon Minnick: 54:24

and it looks exactly the same

Kendall Roden: 54:26

as an age.

Chloe Condon: 54:30

Okay, so it is time for a question, which is our ad hoc based bonus question. And it will come as no surprise that this one will be cat themed. And my question for you candle is if you could have any technology like any technology made no restrictions on like, you know, power flight or anything like that. What technology would you want for your cat?

Unknown: 54:55

Oh,

Brandon Minnick: 54:58

good question.

Kendall Roden: 54:58

That is a really good question. Because I'm my first one that like, just the way I'm processing This is the first thing I thought of is like, Do I have any problems that aren't currently being solved? So, you know, I was thinking, like, what problems are they facing?

Chloe Condon: 55:10

I will say that yesterday, I went for a walk. And there was a young lady with a backpack on with a little hole in the back of her cat was peeking into not so much technology hazardous transportation.

Kendall Roden: 55:24

It's been it's been in my Amazon for like three years like, yeah. So I don't know. So my, what I mean, if it can fly, I mean, obviously, that would be really cool. But I'm trying to think of like, it would be really cool. I feel like my cat can be kind of, you know, sassy, a little, a little aggressive, a little Bidi sometimes. And so I feel like I when I did a foster cat at the beginning of COVID like that wasn't really a problem because he got all of his energy out and he loved having like another companion. So I feel like it would be like almost like a like a holographic or like robot to me like a bag.

Chloe Condon: 56:05

But a cat.

Kendall Roden: 56:08

Yeah, I used to have like a dog that was like, like robotic dog. Like some something like that. That didn't have the maybe the the care and the investment that a second cat would have. But that would give my cat A lot of you know, excitement getting moving around the house. And maybe it's something they could do in like a really cool bubble that would also float you know, if we're just going like really far out there. But yeah, I think it would be some kind of like, holographic animal that maybe I could just like put up on my phone and it would run around I could control its actions and it would like make Kota feel as though you had a companion.

Chloe Condon: 56:45

I love it and I can't wait to see your cat perform at Coachella

Kendall Roden: 56:54

for it is gonna be like up there behind you know Frank Ocean or something just like, ah, code is

Chloe Condon: 56:59

gonna headline. It's great. I free purchase my ticket right now. Okay. Amazing. Well, that's all the questions before we've got five minutes left. But before we let you go to Detroit, like you're gonna get off this call Kendall and like, you have your black belt on and you're like,

Kendall Roden: 57:18

dude, I need to do my roundhouse kicks for the day. Where can people find you on the interwebs? Great question. Everyone come to my little corner of the interwebs. Yeah. So if you want to follow me on Instagram, that one's just more like my personal life. But I you know, I did stand up comedy. I like to be funny. So if you want to go back, I'm a Kindle did it. I think I'm going to start a Kindle wrote it because I like to write. So that's kind of what the theme was Kindle did it, you know, wrote it, whatever. So yeah, so you can follow me on Instagram. They're on Twitter. It's just at Kindle Roden. Same with like LinkedIn. So yeah, that's kind of where I am. We are working on some gvb related content when it comes to like technical blogs and stuff like that. Right now. I'm on medium and have a couple out there. But definitely will keep everyone posted. You know, if you're interested in the more technical aspects of what we do. I'll definitely make sure to follow up with those. But we'll definitely put that on my Twitter account when that time comes so amazing.

Chloe Condon: 58:14

Also, someone in the chat just said cat box with drone to auto fly litter to trash. Brilliant. We're here you start that Kickstarter, we'll find it.

Unknown: 58:24

You did it, you did it.

Chloe Condon: 58:28

Amazing. And as usual, Brandon, I, I'm gonna assume get trends. Still. People should be downloading get trends. Obviously, the official app

Brandon Minnick: 58:38

just released a new update. So you can see not only all of your repos, and how many stars and views and clones each repos getting, but we added a feature where you can see all the totals. So your cumulative from all your repos how many basically what your impact is on the world. So are 10,000 people a week visiting all of your GitHub repos? You can see that today in the new version of Git trends.

Kendall Roden: 59:06

Oh, yeah, find me on GitHub. That's another one. I didn't even think about that just Kindle wrote in, keep it consistent. But yeah, definitely interact with me there too.

Chloe Condon: 59:13

Amazing. This. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Kendall. This was so so much fun. And I didn't think I would be talking about cats as much today. But as a dog person, I'm still here for it. We will see y'all on the interwebs very soon, and we will link to all the awesome deeds below. And thank you so much, Kendall. We'll see y'all next time.