Inside Rocket’s Most Unexpected Innovation

Inside Rocket’s Most Unexpected Innovation

14 November 2025

Wes’ Ping Pong Analytics App

“I play a lot of competitive online games. I like stats. Win rates, kills, losses, all of it. Since we play so much ping pong in the office, I wanted to create something like that for us.”

At Rocket, engineering creativity tends to show up in unexpected places. Sometimes that place is a sprawling enterprise architecture diagram. Other times, it’s hidden under a ping pong table.

That’s where you’ll find one of the most delightfully inventive side projects to come out of the Atlanta office: a full statistical tracking and performance platform built by backend engineer Wesley Maszk. What started as a lunchtime distraction has evolved into a robust internal application that records match results, win rates, player histories, advanced stats, and even a few hidden Easter eggs.

“I play a lot of competitive online games,” Wes explained during a recent conversation. “I like stats. Win rates, kills, losses, all of it. One day I thought, we play so much ping pong in the office, we should have something like those gaming sites but for us.”

So he built it. A full-stack system. For ping pong.

The app began as a simple score-logging tool for about twenty Rocket team members who play regularly. But Wes didn’t stop there. Over time he rewrote the UI, improved the backend, and layered in functionality that would make most table tennis leagues jealous. As he put it, “UI work is brutal for backend developers, so I let AI help clean that up. The backend, though, that’s fun. It’s like stretching muscles you don’t always get to use.”

In true Rocket fashion, the problem-solving didn’t end with software. Wes drafted an expansion plan that would allow live point-by-point scoring without anyone needing to enter results manually. His idea? Smart buttons mounted beneath the table. Players would check in, then tap a button every time they scored.

“Every point would get logged in real time,” he said. “And you’d get this nice tactile click when you tapped the button, so you’d feel like you earned it.” A double tap for aces. A correction button if someone accidentally claimed a point they didn’t deserve. Simple, intuitive, and — in its own way — elegant.

The hardware setup he scoped out would cost about five hundred dollars. For that, Rocket would get the world’s most over-engineered ping pong table. “I just need someone to approve the expense,” he joked. “I already wrote half the API.”

The app has even influenced office culture. Custom paddles have been purchased. Rivalries have formed. And everyone knows who sits at the top of the leaderboard. As Wes admitted with a grin, “Statistically, it’s generally me.”

Beyond the humor and office banter, the project reveals something deeper about Rocket’s engineering DNA. When an idea sparks, Rocket engineers don’t just talk about it. They build it. They experiment. They push boundaries. And sometimes they produce tools no one asked for but everyone ends up enjoying.

Wes’s app isn’t a commercial product. It’s not tied to a client deliverable or a sprint objective. It exists because a Rocket engineer saw a way to make something better, then followed the instinct to create.

That instinct — curiosity paired with execution — is what drives the work Rocket does every day. And occasionally, it also drives a very competitive game of ping pong.

Wes encourages anyone to create an account and use the app here:  https://ping-pong.rcktapp.io/login

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