Heroku Podcasts

Francis Lacoste, a Director of Engineering at Heroku, is a longtime meditation practitioner. In 2015, he attended public seminar on mindfulness by the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute, which was co-founded by a former Google engineer. The workshop emphasized mindfulness as a benefit to businesses by framing the mental health benefits as something that could improve worker productivity. Enlightened by this discovery, he worked to bring the lessons over to Heroku.

Heroku's remote culture introduced some challenges to the original structure of the program. Participants are connected through Zoom meetings, rather than being seated in a room together. As well, the workshop take...

With the explosive growth of people using, and contributing to, open source projects over the last decade, more and more of us are spending their time reading, writing, and understanding documentation.

Heroku's Dev Center is the central hub of documentation for Heroku, covering everything from getting started, to how Heroku works, to extending the platform. It acts as a manual for the entire platform, spanning an enormous number of topics and tools.

Stephen Barlow, lead strategist for Dev Center, joins Heroku designer / developer Charlie Gleason to discuss why good documentation is so important—from some of the common challenges you and your team might face while writing them, to...

Vaidehi Joshi found that many resources on the web about core computer science concepts she wanted to know more about were either too obtuse or too academic. She started a blog, basecs, where she wrote down something she had learned that week--every week--for an entire year. While learning something new in and of itself was a delight, her curiosity led her to question how people learn best.

She discusses the Feynman Technique, which, through a processes of iteratively explaining a concept to someone who doesn't know anything about it, strengthens the knowledge for both the student and the teacher. The best way to do this is by telling a narrative. It keeps the listener engaged, while...

Heroku splits its units of work into squads; on this episode, we're joined by some members of the squad responsible for the Private Spaces feature. Every member of the squad is remote from one another. The team talks about the pain points around this setup, and the solutions they've set up to minimize feelings of isolation. One tactic has been to keep a long-running meeting URL. Individuals from around the team can hop in and enter a space where they can just be social with one another.

Each teammate also explains why they joined Heroku, and what they appreciate about a company that values remote work. They conclude with a discussion on their favorite programming languages and...

Chris Castle introduces Becky Jaimes, the product manager for Heroku Dataclips. Dataclips is a feature that allows you to save and version SQL queries against a Postgres database. You can export these queries to JSON or CSV, share them online, or simply access them through an HTTP API.

The two discuss the history of Dataclips, namely what its original needs were and how it has evolved. It was originally targeted towards individuals who simply wanted a quick way to get access to rows from a database, and now it's grown to be a useful source of information for BizOps teams, engineers, and product managers.

The newest release of Dataclips came out of a very long beta program involving...