Code[ish]

Julián Duque is a senior developer advocate here at Heroku. He attended the NodeConf EU conference in Ireland, and met up with Ruben Bridgewater, a software architect and core Node.js contributor. Julián and Ruben go over the history of Node.js (now in its tenth year), as well as how Ruben became involved with the Node.js project. Ruben's focus on Node is providing its users with good developer ex...

Armed with a Puck.js button and a bluetooth-powered power outlet , Chris Castle decided to make the Christmas lights magic. He dug into the code, Puck.js documentation, and seemingly oft-ignored specifications, eventually reverse engineering the whole thing. He built a site around it, showing how it worked, while learning more about design, SVG animation, and the occasional perils of the tools we...

Anthony Mazzarella, a senior engineering manager at Heroku, is joined by Juan Pablo Buriticá the VP of engineering at Splice. Juan Pablo has spent the last decade building and running engineering teams across different industries. He believes in helping engineers find their role in fulfilling a business' higher level initiatives. Juan Pablo encourages teams to focus on planning just a little bit a...

Alex Korzhikov is an engineer at ING Bank. He's at NodeConf to lead a workshop on using oclif, as well as working with classes and OOP in TypeScript. oclif is a command-line framework developed in TypeScript by Heroku, and ING is using several different tools built on oclif to communicate with each other. He talks with Julián about why they chose oclif, and how TypeScript has enabled them to build...

Robert Blumen is a Dev Ops engineer at Salesforce. He's interviewing Alexey Syomichev, a software engineering principle architect at Salesforce, with over 25 years of experience. Their conversation begins with what constitutes an event (an immutable record encoding something that happened to an app). They then move on to describe consumers of those events, whether they're internal to an app or ext...

Johnny Boursiquot is an SRE at Heroku, and joining him on this episode are Ed Muller (one-time Go language owner at Heroku), and Rishabh Wason, an engineer fresh out of university. Ed initiates the conversation by talking about how Heroku rolls out buildpack updates to users that are concurrent with Go releases. Heroku is a polyglot organization, and Go is being used as one of its four primary lan...

Casey Faist, Heroku's Python Buildpack Maintainer, sits down with Justin Kestler, the co-founder of LitCharts, and Devyn Gasperini, one of its full stack web developers. They discuss the genesis of the project, and how it's really an evolution of Web 2.0 sites such as SparkNotes. LitCharts differentiates itself by providing modern English translations of well-known literary works, as well as color...

Owen Ou, an engineer at Heroku, is joined by Tanmai Gopal, the CEO of Hasura. They start their conversation by describing what GraphQL is, and what problems it set out to solve. GraphQL focuses on making data fetching easier, whether that client is a web browser or an API call. GraphQL provides one endpoint that can query all your application's domain logic. If your primary consumer of data is a f...

Anupam Dagar is now a final-year undergraduate Computer Science student at Indian Institute of Information Technology, in Allahabad. He tells Joe Kutner, a software architect at Heroku, about how he first came across the GitHub Student Pack as a freshman. He needed a domain name, and one of his senior classmates advised him to take a look at the pack, which provides free tools for any student over...

Parker Phinney runs Interview Cake, a company with an online curriculum that prepares candidates for programming interviews. He's interviewed by Julián Duque, a developer advocate at Heroku. Interview Cake offers advice on communicating your intent, tips for navigating various decisions, and computer science concepts such as data structures and algorithm efficiency. Parker explains that he was ins...

Host Rubert Blumen is joined by Salesforce architect Ian Varley to discuss multi-tenancy. Their conversation covers how multi-tenancy differs from multi-user, popular architectures for multi-tenancy, why Salesforce uses a shared resource architecture, how Salesforce scales horizontally, the economics of a mix of small and large users, the importance of scaling down, scheduling, rate limiting and f...

François Hodierne is a lead engineer at Open Collective, and he's joined in conversation by Danielle Adams (the Node.js language owner at Heroku) and Becky Jaimes (the product manager for Heroku Data). Open Collective serves as a legal and banking entity for non-profit tech projects to raise donations and funds. All of Open Collective's repositories are open source, and they run a complete Node.js...

Chris Castle, a developer advocate at Heroku, leads the discussion with Tim Specht, the co-founder and CTO of Dubsmash, a video messaging application. Tim's involvement with software development stretches back over a decade, to the first evolution of smartphones, when memory management was essential and the new user experiences were being formed. It's become easier now to build applications, but t...

Jamie White, a front-end engineer at Heroku, is in conversation with Ben Farrell, an award-winning designer working at Adobe. Ben has just written a book about web components, a way of designing websites that's been available roughly since 2013. Various polyfills and proprietary frameworks have achieved what web components is now trying to standardize: composable units of JavaScript and HTML that...

Leah organizes both RustConf and EmberConf, and has been organizing tech conferences for well over a decade. She talks about some of the lessons she's learned in building inclusivity and accessibility into the conferences, outside of the technical talks. Childcare, for example, is one feature she's introduced that has had a positive effect on both parents and children. Suddenly, workers don't need...

Chris Castle, developer advocate at Heroku, sits down with several individuals working towards making the lives of open source maintainers a little easier: Josh Simmons is the VP of the Open Source Initiative and a Senior Open Source Strategist at Salesforce; Joe Kutner works on open source programs at Heroku; and Pia Mancini, is the co-founder and CEO of Open Collective, a platform that gets fund...

Leah Silber is the CEO of Tilde, and she and her company have been involved in various open source projects over the years, from jQuery and Rails, to Ember and Rust. Her belief is that open source work is more than just the programming: it's also corralling issues, finding the right people for the right problems, and more "real world" tasks such as setting up events and conferences. Because of thi...

You couldn't find a more perfect pair of guests to talk about Rust than Carol Nichols and Jake Goulding. Carol and Jake write books that teach Rust, maintain websites that allow users to run Rust samples, record videos about Rust, and also manage the Rust Belt Rust conference, where Rust developers congregate in the Rust Belt region of America. Carol has a background in Ruby, and always sought to...

Aaron Schlesinger is the core maintainer on Athens, an open source on-prem module proxy. He walks through the history of packages and modules in Go, and introduces how Athens satisfies the needs of developers. Go modules allow you to serve up a Go project's dependencies via an API; Athens implements that API--and integrates with other implementations of the API as well--to simplify dependency mana...

Chris Castle recently attended GopherCon 2019 in San Diego, and captured small conversations from many different Go community members. In Part One of a two-part episode, he had several conversations with GopherCon speakers about what they were building. Nick Gerakines is the Director of Software Engineering at Mattel, the toy company. Mattel has several toys with Internet connectivity, and Go is t...

Joe Kutner, an engineer at Heroku, leads the discussion on Cloud Native Buildpacks with Stephen Levine (engineer at Pivotal), Emily Casey (engineer at Pivotal), Ben Hale (steward of the Java Buildpack), and Terence Lee (engineer at Heroku). All of them are involved in overseeing the CNB project, and have used the technology in production at their companies. At its core, CNBs are an OCI-compliant a...

As part of its product suite to automate a business' needs, Salesforce offers a Live Agent product, whose central component is a chatbot that can respond to a user's inquiries on the web or other messaging platforms, such as Facebook or SMS. A key design requirement of the chatbot is to be able to simulate human interaction by responding quickly. For an engineering team of eight, that means being...

Cory Haber is the VP of Technology for Furnished Quarters, a global corporate housing company. But he's also an educated painter. He's interviewed by Erin Allard, a Platform Support Engineer at Heroku, to delve into the effect technology has had on art, and vice versa. For Cory, art is about the intent of the artist; it's a moot point to ask whether anything a computer produces can be considered a...

Trey starts the conversation with Shirley by noting the difference between being a manager and being a leader. Managers are a framework for discussing pay, onboarding and offboarding, HR interactions, and so forth. Leadership is about inspiring others to unite together to work behind a purpose. Any IC, for example, can be a leader for just a handful of his teammates. Being a good leader means know...

Design is at the very core of Heroku, influencing every aspect of the brand and the platform. Join Vikram Rana, product marketing and developer advocacy lead at Heroku, as he chats with Heroku's head of brand design and front-end developer Charlie Gleason on his role—covering his history and background, what it's like to work at Heroku, and how he handles being a custodian for a brand he loves. Fr...