Heroku Podcasts

Matte Noble is a Senior Software Engineer at Sentry, an application with the capability to stitch together different developer tools through their APIs. For example, an exception that occurs in your application can be automatically represented as an item in your project management tool's backlog. On top of this, Sentry provides a platform for tools to also integrate with. Matte identifies his past work experiences as leading him to conclude that when building an application like this, it's important to consider your two types of users as having distinct concerns: one group is content with using the product as-is, and another group is the set of developers who are building tooling...

Chris Castle sits down with Shirley Xu, who went through a coding bootcamp, and Eric Chen, who is a recent graduate, to talk about their journey into their first programming jobs at Heroku. For both of them, the experience of programming in a day-to-day role is vastly different than what they experienced at school; namely, rather than analyzing algorithms, they were exposed to Ruby, Rails, and entire groups of people involved in shipping features. They recognize that they went through a period experiencing imposter syndrome, before realizing that every developer, no matter their status, shares those same feelings.

Certain soft skills were also acquired. Eric learned how to move past his...

Josh Aas, the co-founder of the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), is interviewed by Craig Ingram, a Runtime Engineer at Heroku. Amongst other outreach programs, ISRG is in charge of developing Let's Encrypt, which is a Certificate Authority (CA) designed to provide free TLS/SSL certificates to any website on the web. While starting ISRG in 2013, Josh noted that only about a third of websites on the Internet were secured by HTTPS. He discovered that not only was the price of acquiring a certificate a barrier to entry, but the technical requirements to apply a certificate was also cumbersome. Let's Encrypt began as a way to simplify the application of aTLS/SSL...

Tyler Montgomery, Trailhead's engineering director, and Shaun Russell, its principal engineer, kick off a conversation with Chris Castle as to how Trailhead came about. One of Salesforce's developer evangelists, Josh Burke, wanted to create some teaching material for classes he taught. The idea was that students wouldn't just read some content and take a quiz; they would perform real actions, such as making a dummy user an admin, and an API call would assert that they accomplished the task successfully.

Due to its tight deadline of just six weeks before Dreamforce, the Trailhead team built the app using Ruby and Rails, and hosted the site on Heroku. Although they've seen...

Terraform is an open source project to help automate the provisioning of infrastructure resources and services for your application. It integrates with cloud platforms through open source plugins, called providers. Mars Hall is a Heroku engineer that works on the Heroku provider. Rather than using a CLI or a web UI, Terraform provides a platform-agnostic configuration file written in the Hashicorp Configuration Language, or HCL. This sets Terraform apart from similar tools like Chef, which relies on Ruby, or Ansible, which only relies on provisioning server state.

The conversation veers towards the architecture of a provider and how individuals can contribute to the Heroku provider...