Heroku Podcasts

Charlie Gleason is a designer and frontend developer at Heroku and Salesforce. He's invited Ben Vinegar, an experienced frontend developer and now manager at Sentry, to share his opinions on what frontend development means today. Way back in 2010, Ben understood that JavaScript, which wasn't taken all that seriously, had the potential to take a more significant part of the web development experience. At the time, Firebug had just been introduced, exposing developers to a debugging experience in the browser. From there, more JavaScript tools and frameworks began to proliferate. Just as Rails popularized the idea of an MVC, so too did Backbone, as well as introduce the concept of...

Greg Nokes worked at Heroku right after it was acquired by Salesforce in December of 2010. He's joined in conversation by Chris De Gour, a Master Technical Architect at Salesforce, who has been working there since the acquisition. It's hard to imagine now, but when Salesforce and Heroku were both starting out, each company was introducing a radically different paradigm in how developers thought about their work. For Salesforce, it was about encouraging enterprise developers to embrace the Internet, and not need to worry about managing complex data schemes. For Heroku, they sought to make it as easy as possible to deploy applications, abstracting away the infrastructure and...

Eric Chen is an engineer on Heroku's Ecosystem team. With him are Justin Abrams and Michael Rispoli, who run Cause of a Kind. Cause of a Kind helps organizations with their SEO; Justin engages with the brands on a marketing level, and Michael looks after their frontend development. The goal for SEO has evolved beyond just having the right metadata appear in search results. It's also about understanding how to make better business decisions, both through marketing strategies as well as organizational and technical planning to create products that serves consumer's needs.

From the Internet's beginnings, SEO has been about helping search bots crawl sites through keywords. The...

Rick Newman is a Director of Engineering at Salesforce Heroku, and he's joined in conversation with Badri Rajasekar, the founder of Jamm. Jamm was created out of a need for remote and distributed teams to not only work together, but for people to feel connected and invested with each other. Under the belief that remote teams were often confronted with a deluge of emotionless texts--from Slack DMs to PR mentions to email--Jamm makes it possible to send video messages to people in your organization. Meetings can also be open access, allowing curious individuals to pop in and join conversations, or allow audio-video chats to play in the background.

Badri recalls that, early in his...

J.T. Wolohan is the author of "Mastering Large Datasets with Python," a book that helps Python developers adopt functional programming styles in their their project prototyping, in other to scale up towards big data projects. Greg Nokes, a Master Technical Architect with Heroku, initiates their conversation by lying out what Python is and what it's being used for. As a high-level scripting language, Python was primarily used by sysadmins as a way to quickly manipulate data. Over the years, an ecosystem of third-party packages have manifested around scientific and mathematical approaches. Similarly, its web frameworks have shifted towards asynchronous flows, allowing...