Heroku Podcasts

Chris Castle introduces Ryan Townsend, CTO of Shift Commerce, and the two begin by discussing the absolutely abysmal performance of web sites in areas with bad latency: airplanes, the rural countryside, or even just within a crowded cafe or conference. Shift Commerce provides a customizable shopping platform for its customers, who are several big brand retailers. For them, every millisecond of delay means lost revenue, as studies have shown that customers are unlikely to complete their purchase if it takes too long.

It's important for Shift Commerce to stay hyper-tuned into its performance. Since it's a multi-tenant application, they have several safeguards in place to ensure that...

More than half of the employees who work on Heroku are remote or distributed employees, meaning Heroku is what you might call remote-first. Host, Chris Castle, brings together five Heroku employees who have had interesting distributed employee experiences. They share some personal stories and discuss setting boundaries, self-awareness, timezones, and some advice for others interested in distributed work.

Raúl Barroso is based in Madrid, Spain. He compares his experience working at Heroku HQ with his current experience as a distributed employee, working from Spain with a team across Europe and the U.S. He also shares his thoughts on the phrase “remote employee” vs “distributed employee”...

Isaac Slavitt is the co-founder of DrivenData, a platform for organizations to solicit help from data scientists to solve real-world problems. DrivenData does this by running "competitions" which asks teams to comb through data sets to solve problems for cash rewards.

One such competition was Zamba. Researchers set up cameras in African forests and asked engineering experts to develop AI software which could classify the types of animals which were captured. This would then help with research and conversation efforts without disturbing the natural ecosystem. Another such competition is DengAI, which seeks ML techniques to try and predict future outbreaks of dengue fever.

Isaac...

Nickolas Means likes to tell stories. His conference talks [1] often center around a curious anecdote, but he deftly weaves both technical and organizational relevancy into them. Nickolas talks about how he builds a talk from conception to execution and goes over some fundamentals of good presentation slides. The goal is to provide a narrative without overwhelming the user with too much textual content.

He continues with advice for novices and experts alike, including how to craft a CFP that will increase the likelihood of your talk being accepted. He suggests that new speakers choose a larger conference to speak at, rather than a smaller one, as they have more capacity to provide...

Brendon Murphy, CTO of Kajabi, talks about his company's experience with Dataclips [1]. Instead of requiring developers to connect to their database, everyone in the company is able to generate analytics on-the-fly, and they even democratize the information via a Slackbot. Their marketing team is able to get real-time feedback on their campaigns through Lita.io [2]

The advantage of using Dataclips dovetails with their preference for using Heroku in general. While they could build their own wrapper to communicate with Postgres, or even manage their own infrastructure, they've found that the financial and operational costs are simply not worth it. By offloading this vital work, they...