Heroku Podcasts

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 the expectations on quality from users has also changed. For Tim, the two journeys are intertwined: it's not enough to have a depth-first approach to software development, and a baseline knowledge of how to make something computationally efficient aids programmers in building pleasing...

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 can be imported and reused across web applications.

Ben goes over his personal experience with web components, and the history of the components themselves, starting with Polymer, which was essentially an experiment from Google. The library essentially recreated what various browser vendors...

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 to fret between networking with their peers and finding quality day care. Leah cautions that the first few years she offered this space, there weren't many enrollments, primarily because attendees didn't know that the option was available. But year after year, more parents...

The talented Charlie Gleason joins Tim and Ruth and chats about his journey into creative coding and the things he has built.

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 funding from companies and individuals and disperses it to the open source projects they use, without those projects needing to have their own business bank account.

The issues involved with financing open source projects are two-fold: first, there's the challenge of actually collecting money...