Heroku Podcasts

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 able to offload as much operational responsibility as possible to Heroku's platform.

Salesforce's customers exist around the world, from Europe to Asia to the Americas. Heroku provide multiregional offerings for its dynos and databases that don't require too much...

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 art. In the end, a human has trained an AI or written the software, and the computer becomes a tool, similar to a camera or a pen.

Engaging in artist practices allows Cory to take a break from the purely logical examinations which programming requires of him. To some, it may be seen as...

Ian Coldwater specializes in breaking and hardening Kubernetes, containers, and cloud native infrastructure. A pre-eminent voice in the Kubernetes security community, Ian is currently a Lead Platform Security Engineer at Heroku. Ian joins Adam Glick and Craig Box to talk about the offensive and defensive arts.

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 knowing what's important, conveying that to someone else, and executing on it.

To do that, Trey emphasizes that a foundation of psychological safety is essential. Allowing people to speak up when they disagree with an issue, or admitting your faults when you've made a mistake, is an...

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.

From tooling, to teamwork, to the ethos of the brand itself, Charlie and Vik dig into what makes good design (and more importantly) what makes design good. They cover topics like ethics, empathy, humility, education, and bringing your authentic self to work.

(Also, one correction—The Cut is based...