Code[ish]

In this episode, Ian, Laura, and Wesley talk about the importance of communication skills, specifically writing, for people in technical roles. Ian calls writing the single most important meta skill you can have. And the good news is that you can get better at it, with deliberate practice! Ian and Wesley both come from engineering backgrounds but have moved into more writing-intensive roles as their careers have progressed. Laura is an instructional designer with experience across many industries. They all agree that writing plays several different important roles for people, whether it's to educate, persuade, or even mark a decision. So if writing is such a critical part of what you're doing from an engineering perspective, how can you get better at it? Laura offers a handful of practices, including providing context, supplying the appropriate level of detail for the audience, using stories or analogies, incorporating repetition, and finding a good editor (even if it's yourself coming back to a piece with fresh eyes). The guests close the episode by sharing some of their favorite resources for improving communication skills, which are listed below. Links from this episode “Programming as Theory Building" by Peter Naur Example of an RFC process Illusion of Explanatory Depth The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker Write and Organize for Deeper Learning by Patti Shank Tech Writing course from Google

This episode is hosted by Alyssa Arvin, Senior Program Manager for Open Source at Salesforce, with guest Jim Jagielski, the newest member of Salesforce's Open Source Program Office (OSPO). They talk about Jim's early explorations into open source software during his time as an actual rocket scientist at NASA and his role in the formation of the Apache Software Foundation. Next, they discuss getting started in open source, specifically, how to find the right open source community for you to start contributing to. They suggest looking for a code of conduct that the project members take seriously to make sure you're joining a community that is welcoming and takes diversity and inclusion seriously. Who's part of an open source community? Well, that would be more than just the contributors--it's also the project's end users, even companies who consume it. Those companies have a responsibility to support the projects they use, to contribute back and provide feedback to keep making it better. As an individual contributor (IC), contributing to open source can be part of your growth plan! Leveraging open source contributions to grow your skill helps you become a better employee. Jim encourages companies to adopt as frictionless a process as possible for employees contributing to open source. Salesforce sees open source as a strategic advantage for the company. It's a way of driving culture, of ensuring that teams collaborate and communicate and, in the process of doing that, drive innovation to benefit not only the individuals who contribute but the company as well. How important is open source to your corporate culture? That will drive how you go about building an Open Source Program Office (OSPO). It really is, at the end of the day, a cultural shift. Finally, Jim shares concrete tips for getting started with your first open source project. He suggests “lurking” in the community and checking their bug tracker for issues marked as “good for newbies.” Most projects have a handful of people who are signed up to be mentors and can help you out. And, look for something like a contributing.md file that makes it clear how you can get involved and what the future will hold for you as you get more involved. Alyssa closes with the comment that she's excited to work with and learn from Jim, and we are too! Expect to hear more from him on future podcast episodes. Links from this episode Open Source at Salesforce Apache Software Foundation Open Source Initiative People Powered by Jono Bacon TODO Group InnerSource Commons The Apache Way

This episode of Codeish includes Greg Nokes, distinguished technical architect with Salesforce Heroku, and Lisa Marshall, Senior Vice President of TMP Innovation & Learning at Salesforce. Lisa manages a team within technology and product that focuses on overall employee success in attracting technical talent and creating a great onboarding experience. The impact of remote work Salesforce is looking at various work configurations across remote and in-office options in different ways. She shares, "In the past 12 months, we've been thinking about what the future will look like. What do our employees want? What do our leaders want for different worker types?" In addition to the fully remote and in-office workers are flex workers who "come into office maybe one, two, three days a week to work with their Scrum teams, or maybe even one day, every other week. You come to an office to work together when it makes sense for you and your team for collaboration and other ways." She notes there's a lot to learn from workers like Greg, who has been working remotely for 12 years. Greg notes, "It took me years to figure out how to work successfully from home and how to have home not encroach on work and work not encroach on home." After unsuccessfully working from the couch, he needed to get an office with a door. Greg stresses that remote work in the pandemic is not the same as remote work at other times. "One of my joys was going to a coffee shop, having a really good cup of coffee and sitting there without headphones on, just listening to people talk while I would write and just that background noise. And I really miss that. So I want to make sure that everybody who's been forced to go remote knows that the present is not a great example of remote work. It's a lot different, and it's a lot harder." Lisa and her team have been talking with other companies who are fully remote and stress that the experience of working fully remote during the pandemic "... isn't normal. We know we all want to see each other. We want to get back together at times where it makes sense." Part of this is focusing on "the things that we can do right now that we want to keep doing in the future when things start to open up." Greg Nokes asserts that a remote-first work approach differs in organizations where remote work is an afterthought. He gives the example of a group of San Francisco employees sending a lunch invitation over a messaging platform, "...and then everyone in San Francisco signed off and when they signed back on, I'm like, ‘What happened?' They'll go, ‘Well, so-and-so said, where do we want to get lunch? And then we all talked about it in the coffee shop; we're all sitting in, and then we went to lunch together.' And we're like, ‘that's not remote.'" Lisa Marshall shares the need for intentional inclusivity. "We all know how horrible it feels when you're in a meeting. And when you're a remote person, and others are in the room, and it's very hard sometimes to get a word in edgewise, it's difficult to hear all the common things." Her team is working on organizational guidelines, including team agreements on how people want to work together. One senior leadership team has decided their weekly team meetings will be 100% remote because they found they communicate better when they're all online versus some co-located. How will offices look in the future? Lisa believes the majority of the office will be flex in the future. "So we're looking at how do we want to configure our spaces to support the kinds of work people want to do in the office? What kind of different technologies can we use? What kind of seating arrangements around couches or different pods or other considerations for building in those spaces to be truly about collaboration versus only individual work?" Lisa's team is also focused on trying apps and tools to see what works and start rolling the tech out to other locations. Greg Nokes shares, "The last year has been a tremendous inflection point. And it's given us the ability to re-examine what work is and how we get it done. And I think folks that are just going to go back to the way it was before are really missing out." What are the unique challenges engineering teams face in a distributed/in-person environment? Dev teams are already agile. Lisa asks how they can adapt to remote work in a way that "doesn't burn people out from staring at screens all the time?" She also believes that release planning will change in response to remote work by breaking it up into "smaller increments virtually to do your planning, whether it's two hours a day and having those chunks of time to work together." Fun is important, and recognizing that people can't work non-stop. But we're all pretty tired of Zoom happy hours. Salesforce recently had a paint party and magicians for parents with kids. Equally important is protecting maker time, where developers need to be heads down to get things done without any meetings. Any advice for new remote workers or new hires? Lisa stresses the importance of onboarding new hires. Part of this is about having fun and building relationships through hanging out virtually together, creating an opportunity for new hires to ask questions about who to go to. "And if you don't build that in, it's really hard to just accomplish that because your work is going to get prioritized based on the tasks that you have." Greg also commends the idea of cross-team get-togethers as an opportunity for diverse opinions.

In this episode of Codeish, Greg Nokes, distinguished technical architect with Salesforce Heroku, talks with Innocent Bindura, a senior developer at Raygun about performance monitoring. Raygun provides tools and utilities for developers to improve software quality through crash reporting and browser and application performance monitoring. According to Innocent, the absence of crash reports does not mean that software is performing well. Software can work - but not be optimal. Thus, Innocent takes a holistic view: “I look at the size of my audience, and if it's something sizable, that gets a lot of traffic, for example, a shopping cart that gets a lot of traffic on a Black Friday. I would want to be in a comfort zone when I know that during the peak periods my application is still performing, so I tend to look at the end-user, how their experience looks like during very high peak periods. And from there I start working my way back to the technology that is supporting that application.” Raygun really shines in monitoring the time spent in different functions and helping to improve the performance of highly hit endpoints. This includes performance telemetry of browser pages, the current application running, and server-side performance application monitoring. Raygun has lightweight SDKs or lightweight providers that can be injected into code. These provide a catch-all to deal with unhandled exceptions. They also encourage best practices for developers. Greg asks how to track a user's journey through the application in order to see the endpoints being hit, and the user experience. A RAM tool can provide opt-in user information. In the case of Javascript, an SDK is integrated with code to create a session ID that follows the user through every single page that they visit. This internal ID can also be associated with crash reports. Over time, Raygun can provide a complete picture of how the user session performed “from the point they visited your page, logged in, visited a couple of pages, and then left your application. The crash reports and the traces relating to that particular user are also tied up with that session on the Raygun side.” Innocent highlights a sampling strategy that reduces the noise of APM data. Raygun also provides a birds-eye application view that provides aggregated stats on application performance: “For the run product, you will have each page aggregated over time, regardless of how many users you've had in a period of time. You want to look at the individual sessions. That information is aggregated and you're able to see, for example, your median, your P90, and P99.” Innocent focuses on the P99 figure because “whoever is in there has had a terrible time, and that forms the basis of my investigations. I want to know why there are so many sessions in that P99, and that P99 is probably a six or seven-second load time. I want to move that to a sub-three-second.” Innocent provides a definition of P99 for new customers undergoing the journey of performance optimization. Next, Innocent asserts that decisions should be based on numbers and empirical evidence. He has found that the use of actionable data has enabled him to redesign applications and focus on the mission-critical command needed in real time. Innocent concludes: “I think the life of a developer is an interesting one. We fit in everywhere situations permit, and we definitely take different routes to develop our careers. But ultimately what we should all be concerned about is the quality of the products that I produce. This definitely reflects on my capability as a software developer. What sets me apart from the next developer is not the number of cool techniques I can do with code, it's delivering a product that actually works and what better way of knowing what works when you actually measure things. Everybody should live by the philosophy of assuming nothing, measure everything. Everything and everything should be measured.” Links from this episode Raygun

In this episode of Codeish, Marcus Blankenship, a Senior Engineering Manager at Salesforce, is joined by Robert Blumen, a Lead DevOps Engineer at Salesforce. During their discussion, they take a deep dive into the theories that underpin human error and complex system failures and offer fresh perspectives on improving complex systems. Root cause analysis is the method of analyzing a failure after it occurs in an attempt to identify the cause. This method looks at the fundamental reasons that a failure occurs, particularly digging into issues such as processes, systems, designs, and chains of events. Complex system failures usually begin when a single component of the system fails, requiring nearby "nodes" (or other components in the system network) to take up the workload or obligation of the failed component. Complex system breakdowns are not limited to IT. They also exist in medicine, industrial accidents, shipping, and aeronautics. As Robert asserts: "In the case of IT, [systems breakdowns] mean people can't check their email, or can’t obtain services from a business. In other fields of medicine, maybe the patient dies, a ship capsizes, a plane crashes." The 5 WHYs The 5 WHYs root cause analysis is about truly getting to the bottom of a problem by asking “why” five levels deep. Using this method often uncovers an unexpected internal or process-related problem. Accident investigation can represent both simple and complex systems. Robert explains, "Simple systems are like five dominoes that have a knock-on effort. By comparison, complex systems have a large number of heterogeneous pieces. And the interaction between the pieces is also quite complex. If you have N pieces, you could have N squared connections between them and an IT system." He further explains, "You can lose a server, but if you're properly configured to have retries, your next level upstream should be able to find a different service. That's a pretty complex interaction that you've set up to avoid an outage." In the case of a complex system, generally, there is not a single root cause for the failure. Instead, it's a combination of emergent properties that manifest themselves as the result of various system components working together, not as a property of any individual component. An example of this is the worst airline disaster in history. Two 747 planes were flying to Gran Canaria airport. However, the airport was closed due to an exploded bomb, and the planes were rerouted to Tenerife. The runway in Tenerife was unaccustomed to handling 747s. Inadequate radars and fog compounded a combination of human errors such as misheard commands. Two planes tried to take off at the same time and collided with each other in the air. Robert talks about Dr. Cook, who wrote about the dual role of operators. "The dual role is the need to preserve the operation of the system and the health of the business. Everything an operator does is with those two objectives in mind." They must take calculated risks to preserve outputs, but this is rarely recognized or complemented. Another component of complex systems is that they are in a perpetual state of partially broken. You don't necessarily discover this until an outage occurs. Only through the post-mortem process do you realize there was a failure. Humans are imperfect beings and are naturally prone to making errors. And when we are given responsibilities, there is always the chance for error. What's a more useful way of thinking about the causes of failures in a complex system? Robert gives the example of a tree structure or AC graph showing one node at the edge, representing the outage or incident. If you step back one layer, you might not ask what is the cause, but rather what were contributing causes? In this manner, you might find multiple contributing factors that interconnect as more nodes grow. With this understanding, you can then look at the system and say, "Well, where are the things that we want to fix?" It’s important to remember that if you find 15 contributing factors, you are not obligated to fix all 15; only three or four of them may be important. Furthermore, it may not be cost-effective to fix everything. One approach is to take all of the identified contributing factors, rank them by some combination of their impact and costs, then decide which are the most important. What is some advice for people who want to stop thinking about their system in terms of simple systems and start thinking about them in terms of complex systems? Robert Blumen suggests understanding that you may have a cognitive bias toward focusing on the portions of the system that influenced decision-making. What was the context that that person was facing at the time? Did they have enough information to make a good decision? Are we putting people in impossible situations where they don't have the right information? Was there adequate monitoring? If this was a known problem, was there a runbook? What are ways to improve the human environment so that the operator can make better decisions if the same set of factors occurs again?

Karan Gupta, Senior Vice President of Engineering, Shift Technologies joins host Marcus Blankenship, Senior Manager Software Engineering, Heroku in this week's episode. Karan shared his career trajectory, which includes founding aliceapp.ai, a fast, privacy-first recording and transcription service for investigative journalism, and acting as an advisor for various companies, including Alphy, a platform for women's career advancement. A concept important to Karan is pragmatic engineering. Pragmatic engineering is about having "an oversized impact on the business by applying the right technology at the right time". It's about the technology, the process of creating that technology, and its impact on the underlying business. For example, building an electric car is cool, but producing a version in which people feel safe? That's engineering that changes the world forever. According to Karan, these are the key things that matter in development: Fast-ness (speed) Function (capabilities provided) Form (how it looks and feels) Fabrication (how it is built on the inside) He recalls the value of the snake game on 404 pages. And the value of intentionality, saying "once you add a feature, it's probably going to be there forever. It's probably going to need maintenance and love and care forever. So do we really want to put it in?" He talks about design and the balance between form versus function, such as designing something aesthetically pleasing versus easy to use. Then, there's fabrication: "How well can we make it? Can we deliver it quickly? And can others maintain it?" Sometimes using off-the-shelf software and well-proven frameworks are the most effective, and "Perfect is the enemy of good enough." Karan stresses the importance of being a learning organization. "Be open to picking up what's out there to help make more informed choices, especially if the choice is to stick with the tried and tested." Good engineers are always open to learning about what new things are coming out and open to different opinions, frameworks, and ways of thinking. Links from this episode Shift Technologies Alphy AliceApp

This episode features a conversation between Robert Blumen, DevOps engineer at Salesforce, and Matthew Myers, principal public key interface (PKI) engineer at Salesforce. Matthew shares his experience running a certification authority (CA) within the Salesforce enterprise. He shares the rationale for the decision to take CA in-house, explaining that becoming a certificate authority means you can become the master of your universe by establishing internal trust. A private or in-house CA can act in ways not dissimilar to a PKU but can issue its own certificates, trusted only by internal users and systems. Using a public certificate authority can be expensive at scale, particularly for enterprises with millions (or even billions) of certificates. However, an enterprise CA can be an important cost-saving measure. It adds a granular level of control in certificate issuing, such as naming conventions and the overall lifecycle. You can effectively have as many CAs as you can afford to maintain as well as the ability to separate them by use case and environment. Further, having the ability to control access to data and to verify the identities of people, systems, and devices in-house removes the cybersecurity challenges such as the recent SolarWinds supply chain attack. Matthew notes that Information within a PKI is potentially insecure “as the information gets disclosed to the internet and printed on the actual certificates which leave them vulnerable to experienced hackers.” Matthews shares the importance of onboarding and people management and the need to ensure staff doesn’t buy SSL certificates externally. Myerss offers some thoughts for businesses considering the DIY route discussing the advantages and limitations of open source resources such as OpenSSL and Let's Encrypt. Identity mapping and tracking are particularly important as you’re giving certificates to people, systems, and services that will eventually expire. Matthew shares the benefits of a central identity store, its core features, and how it works in tandem with PKI infrastructure. There’s also the need to know how many certificates you have in the wild at any given time. As a manager, the revocation infrastructure for PKI implementation means that you're inserting yourself in the middle of every single deal, because if you’re doing it correctly everything needs to validate that the certificates are genuine. When you have a real possibility of slowing down others’ connections, you want to ensure that your supporting infrastructure is positioned in such a way that you are providing those responses as quickly as possible. Network latency becomes a very real thing. Auditability and the ability to trust a certificate authority are paramount. The service that creates and maintains a PKI should provide records of its development and usage so that an auditor or third party can evaluate it. Links from this episode Salesforce Wikipedia page on Public Key Infrastructure Wikipedia page on Certificate Authorities OpenSSL Let’s Encrypt

This episode is a conversation between Heroku developer advocate, Chris Castle and James Dong, developer and owner of Last Minute Gear. The business enables San Francisco residents to buy, rent, and borrow clothing and outdoor gear for activities such as camping, snow sports, and climbing. During the early days of the pandemic, the business was forced to close to comply with shelter-in-place regulations. There was an outpouring of support for small businesses, but not everyone has a Venmo account or wants to donate to a GoFundMe appeal. While many used the pandemic to catch up on Netflix and banana bread baking, James spent a day coding a website and platform where businesses could sell gift cards. It not only helped his own anxiety and insomnia but helped brick-and-mortar businesses like gyms and restaurants (and his own shop) to still earn revenue. It allowed customers to purchase gift cards to be remunerated once businesses reopened. While other platforms with this functionality already existed, James’ project included business-critical functions, such as processing payments and gift cards. James talks about his experiences of anxiety and insomnia which acted as catalysts in making his website operational in just one day. Support from Stripe and Heroku meant there were no fees—all money generated went to the businesses. The conversation offers interesting insights into the value of using a decision logger to document ideas and milestones as well as notes and commit messages to explain why particular decisions were made at certain points in time. It’s also a great example of what can happen when developers build projects that help others in need. Links from this episode Last minute gear — James’ outdoor sports store. Gift Cards for Small Businesses

This episode is a conversation led by Greg Nokes, a Product Manager with Salesforce, Dan Mehlman, a Director of Technical Architecture for Salesforce, Mike Rose, a Director of Technical Architecture for Salesforce, Jack Ziesing, a Technical Architect with Salesforce. They're interviewing Nick Sawhney, a college student who saw an opportunity to make his friends laugh and built something that grew beyond his wildest dreams. At the 2021 US Inauguration, a single shot of Bernie Sanders sitting in a chair captured the hearts of many on the Internet. People everywhere were photoshopping him in the unlikeliest of places. Nick utilized his Python skills and quickly built a Heroku app that would allow users to place Bernie anywhere in the world, by adding him to any image available on Google Street View. To say the app was a success was an understatement. Inundated by tweets and distracted by press requests, Nick couldn't devote the time needed to keep the app stable and operational. He sent out a desperate tweet for help, only to be picked up by no less than Dan and Michael, who recruited Jack to help Nick with his operational issues. They paired together in a number of ways, optimizing Jack's Python code, securing its authentication logic, and autoscaling dynos in order to handle the waves of traffic. All of these rapid changes allowed Nick to step back and engage with fans on where they'd like to take Bernie next. In addition to a newfound gratitude towards Heroku's team, Nick learned a few lessons from this experience. He was really humbled by the availability of the engineering community to donate their time and knowledge to help his issues. It's also inspired him to create videos to teach others how they can mitigate scaling issues in their architecture before it becomes a problem. He's also hoping to create some open source tools that to monitor things like server costs and availability issues for other small projects.

Chris Castle, a developer advocate at Heroku, is joined in conversation with Andrew Lenards, a 20-year programming veteran and meditation coach. He believes that meditation is the practice of familiarizing one's mind with its various states. Concentration is the ability to place attention on something for as long as desired. Clarity is about identifying the sensory experiences in your body. Equanimity is about accepting the state of the world around you. In programming terms, mindfulness becomes a sort of monitoring and observability tool for our bodies. Andrew suggests that curious listeners focus their attention on sourcing materials from secular sources. As well,the benefits of meditation can only come after quite a bit of time. The inclination of most starting practitioners is to quit before investing to see the benefits. Even if you feel like you're doing it "wrong" or feeling your mind get distracted, the core tenant of the practice is to not judge yourself. This in turn will help bring about the calmness which meditation can offer. Links from this episode "The Mind Explained" Niksen is a methodology focusing on "doing nothing" Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction "The Art of Noticing" Search Inside Yourself “99% Invisible” podcast Meditation information on Andrew's site: lenards.us and Afternoon Idle - 15 min guided meditation via a YouTube live stream Breathe (iOS / Android), Headspace, Calm and Ten Percent Happier are just a few apps which can help your meditation practice

Nowadays, the internet is so huge that it can be hard for people to find others who share their niche interests. But when they do find that rare kindred spirit, it can feel like a magical moment. Lynn Fisher and design agency &yet have been exploring ways to help people build community around their passions (which can sometimes be a little “weird”). The team launched a project called “Find Your Weirdos” that incorporates different tools, sites, and techniques for helping people connect with their fellow weirdos. Their project also helps companies connect with customers through niche interests. Inspired by the Weirdos project, the &yet team envisioned ways to help Heroku developers connect — and the Wicked CoolKit was born. The kit harkens back to the earlier days of the internet, when simple, fun web widgets and tools helped people connect without all the noise of today’s mega social platforms. The initial version of the kit offers a new take on a few nostalgic web widgets, including: Developer trading cards — Echoing the retro joy of collecting baseball cards or playing card-based games, this widget allows developers to create their own profile card. They can specify their personal bio, coding skills, niche interests, “feats of strength,” and more, and share it within an elegantly designed UI. Themed stickers — A perennial favorite, stickers are a colorful way to identify interests, such as baking or woodworking. Users can download stickers to use as they wish, or add a sticker to their trading card that links to other people’s cards that have the same sticker. Webring — Years ago, fans and friends would use a webring to share a collection of websites dedicated to a specific topic. The kit brings the old school webring into the modern context and allows people to easily share and access web resources. Hit counter — Everyone wants to know how many visitors came to their site. The old-fashioned hit counter is a fun way to track and display page visits. The higher the number, the more likely people will want to engage with the site (and the developer behind it). The Wicked CoolKit is fully open source and available to use. Links from this episode Lynnandtonic.com — Lynn’s personal website. wickedcoolkit.com — Home of the Wicked CoolKit Show, don’t tell — the story behind the Wicked CoolKit. Find.yourweirdos.com — a series of essays on how companies connect with customers through sharing mutual niche interests. Face.camp — an app that connects to Slack for people to capture and post animated gifs. Wegotchu.cards — digital cards that people can pass around and sign.

Corey Martin leads the discussion with two developers about production incidents they were personally involved in. Their goal is to inform listeners on how they discovered these issues, how they resolved them, and what they learned along the way. Ifat Ribon is a Senior Developer at LaunchPad Lab, a web and mobile application development agency headquartered in Chicago. For one of their clients, they developed an application to assist with the scheduling of janitorial services. It was built with a fairly simple Ruby on Rails backend, leveraging Sidekiq to process background jobs. As part of its feature set, the app would send text messages to let employees know their schedule for the week; these schedules were assembled by querying the database several times, fetching frequencies and availabilities of workers. Unfortunately, a client noticed a discrepancy between how many notices were being sent out, versus how many jobs they knew they had: of the 400 jobs total, only 150 had notifications. It turned out that all of the available database connections were being exhausted--but that was only half of the issue. Sidekiq was attempting to process far too many jobs at once, and each of these jobs were responsible for connecting to the database, exhausting the available pool. The solution Ifat settled on was to reduce the number of parallel jobs processed while increasing the number of connections to the database. From this experience, she also learned the importance of understanding how all these different systems interconnect. Christopher Ostrowski is Chief Technology Officer at Dutchie an e-commerce platform for the cannabis industry. One Christmas Eve, while celebrating with his family, Chris began receiving pager notifications warning him about some sluggish API response times. Since it didn't really have any significant end user impact, he ignored it and went back to the festivities. As the night went on, the warnings became significant alerts, and he pulled together a response team with colleagues to figure out what was going on. By all accounts, the website was functioning, but curiously, the rate of orders began to drop off. Through some investigation, they realized what was going on. Customers' order numbers were assigned a random, non-sequential six digit numbers. Dutchie was about to track its one-millionth order, a huge milestone. Before any orders are created, though, the app generates a six digit number, and tries to create one that doesn't already exist. The database was constantly being hit, as less and less six digit numbers were available for use. The solution ended up being rather simple: the order number limit was increased to nine digits. Although they had monitoring in place, the data was set up as an aggregate reporting; even though the "create order" API was slow, all of the others were low, keeping the average within tolerable levels. Christopher's solution to avoid this in the future was to set up more groupings for "essential" API endpoints, to alert the team sooner for latency issues on core business functionality. Links from this episode LaunchPad Lab is a web and mobile application development agency Dutchie is an e-commerce platform for the cannabis industry

Rick Newman is a Director of Engineering at Salesforce Heroku. He's joined by Marco Faella, a professor of advanced programming and author of "Seriously Good Software." In Marco's view, there are of course several ways ways to characterize "good" software. Excellent software that goes above and beyond correct functionality includes code that is readable, robust, and performant. Each of these have different importance, depending on context. Robust software, for example, includes addressing issues with scalability, but only if one expects the software to be in such a high availability environment. It's important to address these requirements from the beginning, when the software architecture is being mapped out. Marco gives the example of developing software for an external client. This client might know all the business logic and how it ought to function, but addressing the code's future evolution and maintenance are just as important, and whose responsibility lands squarely in the hands of the developer. It can also be worthwhile to make an investment in education, learning about algorithms, data access, and other key concepts in the world of computer science. Such a foundation would allow one to adapt to the changing conditions of programming, whether those are caused by new hardware or modifications in the languages themselves. Links from this episode "Seriously Good Software" is Marco's book on the subject of writing strong code -- get a 40% discount with the code podish19

Host Greg Nokes is a distinguished technical architect with Heroku. His guests are Alli McGee, a product manager, and Lewis Buckley, a senior application engineer, from BiggerPockets. BiggerPockets was founded 16 years ago to educate non-professionals about real estate investing. As a self-funded company, it’s critical for BiggerPockets to create products that customers will pay for. One way they achieve this product/market fit is by building cross-functional teams that are user-focused. All product teams have a project manager, tech lead, and designer that work closely together. This design-led approach allows teams to collaborate with representation from users, technology, and design. As the PM on one of these teams, Alli lives at the intersection of what can we do for business, what can we do from a technology perspective, and what can we do for the user. She advocates for the customer, bringing knowledge of what customers want, what problems they are facing, and how they have interacted with prototypes in usability studies. Alli also advocates for the business to be sure products make money. Finally, Alli advocates for developers to make sure the project is technically feasible and won’t cause technical debt. Another way BiggerPockets creates market fit is by creating Minimum Lovable Products—the smallest cheapest thing they can build that people love. With their current product, BP Insights, Alli and Lewis used this strategy to create the first iteration of a product that provides insight into local real estate markets. They then tested the product with users, iterated, and slowly built out a more fully formed offering. For their tech stack, BiggerPockets is built on a Ruby on Rails monolith. While some in the industry say Ruby on Rails’ time is over, Lewis argues that it has been a great choice, as using a well-known stack has allowed them to worry less about the technology and focus more on building value for users. The BP Insights product was built on this monolith using a massive data set of nearly every property in the US. BiggerPockets imported the data to an Amazon S3 bucket and eventually copied the data to Amazon Redshift for querying. Links from this episode BiggerPockets

Robert Blumen is a DevOps engineer with Salesforce, and he's joined in conversation with Andrzej Ludwikowski, a software architect at SoftwareMill, a Scala development shop. Andrzej is introducing listeners to the concept of event sourcing against the more traditional pattern of CRUD, which stands for create-read-update-delete. CRUD systems are everywhere, and are most typically associated with SQL databases. In comparison, event sourcing is a simply a sequential list of every single action which occurred on a system. Whereas in a database, a row may be updated, erasing the previous data in a column, and event source system would have the old data kept indefinitely, and simply record a new action indicating that the data was updated. In a certain sense, you can get the state of your system at any point in time. Each architectural pattern has its pros and cons. For one, an event source system can make it easier to track down bugs. If a customer notes an issue an production, rather than pouring through logs, developers can simply "rewind" the state of the application back to some earlier event and see if the faulty behavior is still there. On the flip side, since the event stream is immutable, fixes to previous data needs to be made at the end of the stream. You can modify old events or insert new ones into the flow. CQRS, or Command Query Responsibility Segregation, builds on top of event sourcing. The idea is to separate the part of the application responsible for handling commands and writes from the part responsible for handling queries and reads. This separation is not only on a software level (different repositories and different deployments), but also on the hardware level ( different hosts and different databases). The motivation for this is to be able to scale each part independently. Maybe your app has more writes than reads, and thus requires different computing power. It allows for a separation of concerns, and can make overall operations more efficient, albeit at a complexity cost. Andrzej is quick to note that event sourcing and CQRS divisions are not necessary for every application. Teams, as always, need to understand how the data flows in their application and which architectural pattern is most efficient for the problems they are trying to solve. Links from this episode SoftwareMill is a Scala development shop Martin Fowler gives a brief run-down on event sourcing On the SoftwareMill blog, Andrzej has a blog posts on entry-level event sourcing, keeping your domain clean in Event Sourcing, and the best serialization strategy for Event Sourcing CQRS.nu provides more educational resources Andrzej Ludwikowski's web site and talk Event Sourcing: What could go wrong?

Luke Kysow is a software engineer at HashiCorp, and he's in conversation with host Robert Blumen. The subject of their discussion is on the idea of a service mesh. As software architecture moved towards microservices, several reusable pieces of code needed to be configured for each application. On a macro scale, load balancers need to be configuring to control where packets are flowing; on a micro level, things like authorization and rate limiting for data access need to be set up for each application. This is where a service mesh came into being. As each microservice began to call out to each other, shared logic was taken out and placed into a separate layer. Now, every inbound and outbound connection--whether between services or from external clients--goes through the same service mesh layer. Extracting common functionality out like this has several benefits. As containerization enables organizations to become more polyglot, service meshes provide the opportunity to write operational logic once, and reuse it everywhere, no matter the base application's language. Similarly, each application does not need to rely on its own bespoke dependency library for circuit breakers, rate limiting, authorization and so on. The service mesh provides a single place for the logic to be configured and everywhere. Service meshes can also be useful in metrics aggregation. If every packet of communication must traverse the service mesh layer, it becomes the de facto location to set up counters and gauges for actions that you're interested in, rather than having each application send out non-unique data. Luke notes that while it's important for engineers to understand the value of a service mesh, it's just as important to know when such a layer will work for your application. It depends on how big your organization is, and the challenges you're trying to solve, but it's not an absolutely essential piece for every stack. Even a hybrid approach, where some logic is shared and some is unique to each microservice, can be of some benefit, without necessarily extracting everything out. Links from this episode HashiCorp helps automate infrastructure configuration Consul, Linkerd, Istio, and Kuma are several open source components for service meshes and control planes Mastering Service Mesh: Enhance, secure, and observe cloud-native applications with Istio, Linkerd, and Consul by Anjaki Khatri and Vikram Khatri Consul service mesh What's a service mesh? And why do I need one? by William Morgan offers additional advice on when to use service meshes The Service Mesh: What Every Software Engineer Needs to Know about the World's Most Over-Hyped Technology What is a Service Mesh? - a blog from NGINX

Rick Newman interviews Mikolaj Pawlikowski, who recently wrote a book called "Chaos Engineering: Crash test your applications." The theory behind chaos engineering is to "break things on purpose" in your operational flow. You want to deliberately inject failures that might occur in production ahead of time, in order to anticipate them, and thus implement workarounds and corrections. Typically, this practice is often used for large, distributed systems, because of the many points of failure, but it can be useful in any architecture. One of the obstacles to embracing chaos engineering is finding high level approval from other teammates, or even managers. Even after the feature is a complete and the unit tests are passing, it can be difficult to convince someone that some resiliency work needs to continue, because there's no visible or tangible benefit to preparing for a disaster. Mikolaj suggests that people clearly lay out to other colleagues the ways a system can fail, and the impact it can have on the application or business. Rather than try to fear monger, it can be useful to point to other companies' availability issues as words of caution for their teams to embrace. Mikolaj also says that chaos engineering doesn't need to focus solely on complicated problems like race conditions across distributed systems. Often, there's enough low hanging fruit, such as disk space running out or an API timing out, that can be useful to consider fixing. The chaos engineering mindset can also extend beyond pure software. If you think about people working across different timezones as a distributed system, you can also optimize for failures in communication before they occur. Everyone works at a different pace, and communication issues can be analogous to a network loss. Rather than fix miscommunications after they occur, establishing shared practices (like writing down every meeting, or setting up playbooks) can go a long way to ensuring that everyone will be able to do their best under changing circumstances. Links from this episode Mikolaj's book is called Chaos Engineering: Crash test your applications -- get a 40% discount using the code podish19 powerfulseal is a testing tool for Kubernetes clusters Mikolaj distributes the Chaos Engineering Newsletter Conf42 is a conference focusing on high-level computer science ChaosConf is the world’s largest Chaos Engineering event Awesome Chaos Engineering is a curated list of Chaos Engineering resources

Robert Blumen is a DevOps Engineer at Salesforce, joined by Ev Haus, Head of Technology at ZenHub. Together, they're going over a critique over several methodologies when writing code as part of a large team. First, there's DRY, which stands for Don't Repeat Yourself. It's the idea that one should avoid copy-pasting or duplicating lines of could, in favor of abstracting as much repeated functionality as possible. Then, there's DAMP, or Don't Abstract Methods Prematurely, which is somewhat in opposition to DRY. It advises teams to not create abstractions unless they are absolutely necessary. Last on the list is WET, or Write Everything Twice. This is the idea to embrace duplication whenever possible. Ev notes that, like many programming absolutes, the success of each strategy depends entirely on the context. DRY, for example, sounds like a really good idea, until it happens everywhere. Suddenly, a chunk of code becomes difficult to reason, as a developer jumps around various method definitions to piece together a flow. DAMP often makes sense as a counterpart to DRY, because if you abstract too early in your codebase, you may find yourself overloading methods or appending arguments to handle one-off cases. DRY is typically best suited for testing environments, where an absolutely reproducible set of explicit steps is often preferable in order to quickly understand what is occurring. No matter the strategy you use, the core tenant is to solve the problem first. Try to accomplish the goal you need to, whether that's adding a feature or squashing a bug. Don't over optimize until you've finished what you need to, and don't think too far into the future about all the possible edge cases. The rest of the balance comes with experience. Some duplication is bad, but not all of it. Figuring out the absolute perfect solution is unlikely, so you've got to put the code out into the real world to find out what works. After that, bake some flexibility into your processes to adjust hot code paths or refactor them when needed! Links from this episode ZenHub is an agile project management tool for GitHub Wikipedia's definition of DRY "Using DRY, WET & DAMP code" is Ev's article on different coding methodologies Codewars is a website with programming puzzles and challenges The Pragmatic Programmer by Dave Thomas is a popular book highlighting some of these concepts DRY code, DAMP DSLs by Jay Fields and DRY vs DAMP in Unit Tests by Vladimir Khorikov are more write-ups on the subject

Host Joe Kutner is an architect working at Salesforce, and his guest is Cornelia Davis, the CTO of Weaveworks, a platform for infrastructures. Cornelia argues that most companies building complex web-based applications are doing so without fully understanding the unique operational challenges of that environment. Even several well-known patterns, such as adding circuit breakers or retry patterns, are not standardized across the industry, and certainly not across languages, let alone in frameworks and other easily consumable dependencies. In many cases, there are over reliances on infrastructure availability that only become obvious once a problem occurs. Cornelia gives the example of a massive AWS outage that occurred several years ago. For many companies lacking redundancy contingencies, their applications were offline for hours, through no fault of their own. Another potential conflict between operational patterns and software design emerges around container-based lifecycles. If you have a new application configuration that you want to deploy, Kubernetes, which is designed to be stateless, encourages you to simply get rid of a pod and start up a new one. But it's entirely possible that there's some running code that doesn't know how to pick up these new changes, or even a service which can't recover from unexpected downtime. Considering these issues is the difference between running the cloud and being truly cloud native. To the industry's credit, Cornelia does see more platforms and frameworks adopting these patterns, so that teams don't need to write their own bespoke solution. However, it's still necessary for software developers and operational engineers to know the features of these platforms and to enable the ones which make the most sense for their application. There is no "one size fits all" solution. As the paradigms mature, so too does one's knowledge of the interconnected pieces need to grow, to prevent unnecessary errors. Links from this episode Weaveworks automates enterprise Kubernetes The twelve-factor app Cornelia wrote a book called Cloud Native Patterns (get a 40% discount using the code podish19)

Hailey Walls is a Customer Solutions Architect with Heroku, and she's engaged in a conversation with Paul Orland, the founder of Tachyus and author of Math for Programmers. Paul took graduate level math classes, and even ended up with a Master's degree in Physics, but even he admits that he comes down with his own kind of math anxiety. Now, he works as a programmer, building predictive models, but he encounters many engineers who don't have a basic understanding of fundamental math concepts, like calculus or linear algebra. Seeking to rectify this, he wrote a book called Math for Programmers, which methodically explains mathematical concepts using real-world examples. He hopes to be able to teach math to many more people. Paul emphasizes that, although thinking of mathematics can be intimidating, it's not different than working on any other skill. If you decide to go weight lifting, you start with a 10 pound weight, then a 15 pound one, and on and on. Similarly, with math, if you train on problems that are simpler, future problems will build upon the techniques you've honed. The appeal for gaining math skills is almost analogous to that of programming: there is always a right and final answer. Just as a compiler determines how a program works and whether a syntax is valid, taking in input and producing output, so too is math deterministic. Fundamentally, better mental acuity with math can help teach you how to consider the behaviors of complicated systems. For people interested in studying math more closely, Paul advises students to not be discouraged by problems which appear hard. It can be best to pick a problem that you are naturally interested in, which will lead to a general willingness to try and solve it. Similarly, he'll also take a math concept and turn it into a program, which has helped him reason about flow and patterns much more clearly in the past. Links from this episode Tachyus helps energy producers optimize their production Math for Programmers is the book Paul wrote -- listen for a 40% off code

Julián Duque is a Lead Developer Advocate at Salesforce and Heroku, and he's continuing a previous discussion with some members of Respeecher. Respeecher has created AI software which works within the speech-to-speech domain: it takes one voice and makes it sound exactly like another. Dmytro Bielievtsov, its CTO and co-founder, explains the practical uses of the software, such as re=recording the lines of an actor who is unavailable, or bringing historical figures to life in a museum. In terms of sophistication, there are quite a few speech ML models already available on the Internet. The best source of audio to duplicate the speech patterns of a famous person is to grab an audiobook and pass it through one of these pre-existing models. But these models produce outputs which are poor in quality. That's one reason that speech-to-speech is hard to fake. The variation in our mouths and speech patterns, not to mention the emotive qualities, make the process of creating duplicate voices extremely difficult to pull off. One way Respeecher data can't be faked is by the fact that they position themselves as a B2B business, dealing with studios and other large estates which have access to immense amounts of hard-to-acquire sound data. The likelihood of another entity abusing a well-known voice is close to none. Another feature is that the audio is watermarked. Certain "artifacts" are embedded into the audio, which are imperceptible to humans, but easily identifiable by a computer program. There's a consortium of several companies working on synthesized media who strategize in Slack on various ways to keep the tech from being misused. As well, Dmytro believes that there needs to more investment in education, to let people know that such technology exists, and to therefore be a bit suspicious with media they encounter online. Links from this episode Respeecher is a speech-to-speech voice cloning software Google's DeepMind and Tacotron are two popular AI/ML projects Module empowers the future of identity, online safety, and communication through voice Previous episode: 98. The Ethical Side of Deep Fakes

Julián Duque is a Lead Developer Advocate at Salesforce and Heroku. He's joined by Alex Serdiuk, the CEO of Respeecher. Respeecher has created AI software which works within the speech-to-speech domain: it takes one voice and makes it sound exactly like another. Alex rejects the premise that all deep fakes--that is, pictures and videos generated by AI--are inherently evil. He considers tools like CGI and Photoshop to fall within the realm of synthesized media, which helps artists create content. He positions Respeecher within that same mileu. Respeecher has been working with Hollywood studios for some time. It removes pressure from actors who are unable to rerecord lines. It's also been used in situations where actors need to sound much younger, a visual-audio process called de-aging. In the future, applications of speech-to-speech work could also be used in museums, to provide a new dimension of history for audiences. Of course, Alex recognizes that the main issue with deep fakes is not their existence, but their inability to be detected. To solve this problem, Respeecher watermarks its audio, to generate inaudible metadata which can nonetheless be analyzed to show whether a particular recording was faked. He also believes that more people need to be educated that synthesized media exists. Something one sees or hears might not be real, because technology is getting more and more advanced. We should all be mindful about the content we consume. Links from this episode Respeecher is a speech-to-speech voice cloning software Samsung Next provides an overview of the synthetic media landscape

Jacob Silzer, Trusted Security Director at Heroku, is co-hosting this episode with Trey Ford, VP of Platform, Trust, and Strategy at Salesforce. They're sitting down with Tim Panagos, CTO of Microshare. Microshare began as a platform to aggregate wireless sensor data from IoT devices. Much of their use cases were for smart offices; for example, seeing how occupied a conference room was, whether a hot desk was open, and when a particular area had been cleaned. For hospitals, their platform monitored physical equipment, such as patient beds and medicine carts. These devices ran on a LoRaWAN network, which doesn't communicate through Wi-Fi, making it ideal for secure locations. Then, COVID hit. Suddenly, information from these devices, where were useful from a logistic and compliance standpoint, became extraordinarily important. By tracking the amount of people in a room, the amount of times an area was cleaned, or the movements of an unknown carrier, whole industries can monitor their overall health efficacy, comparing their performance not only with their past, but also, with other similar businesses. Tim gives the example of an airport here: one could potentially see how their cleaning efficiency is compared to other airports around the world. Part of the success of their platform is their reliance on the blockchain. Businesses can monitor not only how their data has changed over time, but they can look back on any block and identify what factors may have contributed to a decreased in performance. Tim notes that the platform is not bulletproof. For starters, tracking equipment requires people to remember to add trackers; a simple error, to be sure, but one which is frequently forgotten as new crash carts are added to quickly meet increased demands. But more urgently, no one really knows how the future will change in response to the knowledge we only currently have. Microshare was only able to pivot because they were wise enough to recognize that their business and their software needed to be flexible. They essentially threw out their 2020 roadmap in order to focus on tracking clean air and open spaces. The best way to move forward is not just to collect more data, but to also add context to it, which will create meaningful value. Links from this episode Microshare is a data leverage platform utilizing IoT devices LoRA Alliance is a non-for-profit group consisting of companies committed to LPWAN

Greg Nokes, a Master Technical Architect with Heroku, interviews two members of Yobota, a banking systems provider: Ammar Akhtar, its CEO and co-founder, and James Maidment, the head of Technical Operations. The financial industry is heavily regulated. As it stands, it was only until about 2016 that the UK (where Yobota is based) gave favorable guidance for vendors to operate in the cloud. As a service provider, the banks that use Yobota are audited by the Financial Conduct Authority. As part of that audit, every single deployment performed over a year is examined. Regulators select a random set of them, and Yobota has to demonstrate that they know who was involved in the release, and precisely which services were affected. Thus, their entire shipping process is revolved around meeting this regulation goals. They're an integral part of the company, just as data security and uptime availability are. The platform is designed in such a way to both evolve quickly and quickly perform safe deployments that are observable. Unlike other startups, Yobota has decided to invest in a sysadmin team, in order to split the organization between people who develop features and people who manage their compliance. For example, as the company grows, they've found that active hands-on management of permissions has been a valuable investment. Different groups need access to staging environments versus production environments; and, with over 300 apps on multiple dynos, access to resources needs to be carefully configured. This is seemingly slow shipping process is advantageous for two reasons. First, meeting compliance is the law, and flirting around that has tremendous consequences. But second, and more importantly, Yobota also provides fake environments for their engineers to develop around. They're able to give developers the ability to experiment with their platform in a safe way; should they choose to advance a feature into a production environment, a different team is able to address what needs to be done to meet the needs of that regulated environment. James suggests to other companies working in these sorts of industries to consider compliance integral to the way their systems operates, and to think about concerns upfront, in advance of working on any feature. Links from this episode Yobota is a core banking platform that allows financial institutions to launch innovative products in a fast and reliable way

Corey Martin values storytelling. It's just one way developers can share their experiences in order for others to take lessons. To that end, this episode takes a close look at production issues from two different applications to examine what went wrong and how it was fixed. Meg Viar is a Senior Software Developer at Nomadic Learning, an e-learning platform. One day, they noticed that, for a certain group of users, a column of information in their database row was nulled. It didn't look like any user--either internally or externally--intentionally changed these values, and there hadn't been any new code deployed in days. The only clue was that the data was all changed at the same time. It turned out that a weekly cron job was deleting some data on an in-memory list. However, the database ORM they use also overloads the delete keyword, and was actually deleting the production data. Restoring the data from a backup was easy, and reworking the code to not use the data was a quick fix. However, going forward, Meg and her team came up with several ways to adjust the process around code changes like this from occurring again. Brendan Hennessy is the co-founder and CTO at Launchpad Lab, a studio that builds custom web and mobile applications. One of their clients is an SAT/ACT test prep app, and students complained that the app was extraordinarily slow. Brendan was accustomed to seeing such feedback on testing days, when heavy volume brought added strain to servers, and they accounted for this by increasing capacity. But this was different: there weren't any tests scheduled during the period. Instead, one of their own services was inadvertently DDOSing an endpoint, expecting a response; when one didn't arrive, it just kept making requests. They reworked this code to make a request once and simply wait for a response without trying again. In the future, they committed themselves to doing more in-person blitzes of new features, since issues like this only arise after multiple users use the app--something automated tests have trouble simulating. Links from this episode Nomadic Learning builds digital academies Launchpad Lab builds custom web and mobile applications for startups and established businesses

Becky Jaimes is a product manager at Salesforce. She's interviewing Wesley Magness, the founder of ElectricSMS, and Melanie Plaza, the Head of Technology at AE Studio. ElectricSMS is a service to help consumers manage their various subscriptions, whether that's recurring orders of dog food or monthly boxes of snacks. ElectricSMS started as a project within AE Studio's incubator program, fitting in with their ethos to empower people through technology. AE Studio is a bootstrapped company that works with clients by offering development, data science, and design help to enable startups and enterprises to build technology products that helps humans, not profits. Their philosophy is to build products that treat their users well, so that the business can grow much more healthily than if you trick users into purchasing something they didn't mean to, or otherwise making it difficult for them to cancel. ElectricSMS is an example of how those principles came together in a collaborative partnership. For listeners interested in starting their own business, Wesley suggests finding a customer before working on something. You don't need an actual user to work with, but rather, a customer or industry who you know would benefit from what you built. With services like Heroku and Stripe it can be very easy to build an MVP from the ground up. Melanie concurs, and suggests talking to people who might want what you're making, and what their problems and needs are. Research what other solutions have and haven't worked. Startups can also reach out to AE Studio for direct consultation on taking their product to the next level, and potentially join their incubator program as well. Links from this episode ElectricSMS helps users manage their subscriptions through their phone Effective altruism movement advocates using evidence and reasoning to determine the most effective ways to benefit others

Corey Martin, a customer solutions architect at Heroku, interviews Ariel Assaraf, the CEO of Coralogix, a platform that helps companies get a grasp on their log data. All too often, logs are considered as only a useful debugging tool. After receiving an alert around high resource usage or an elevated error rate, a developer might check their logs to see what caused the issue. But Ariel argues that this is too late to investigate a problem; by visualizing and alerting log data, you can figure out production problems before users encounter them. Metrics, in other words, are a lagging indicator, while logs are a real-time representation of how your code is really performing. One way to reconcile these two is to aggregate log data and funnel it into other long-term metric storage. This would allow you to see longer term trends. Ariel provides a scenario where log records appear in groups, such as a user purchasing a product, followed by an API call to Stripe, and concluding with an email notifying the user. A platform like Coralogix can automatically identify that the three logs arrive together within a certain time frame. If, for any reason, one of these steps fails to log, then a notification can be set up to notify the team to proactively investigate, rather than a customer writing in to report an error. For an organization to beginning using logs as time-series data, Ariel recommends three things. First, a unified log format, which could be something structured like JSON. These can be generated by a middleware service. Next, a shared understanding across teams on the severity with which to log a message. The final step is to set up an alerting policy; not only which types of alerts to create, but also where they go, such as Slack, email, or text message. After that, you can begin to incorporate your logs into your monitoring processes. Links from this episode Coralogix is an observability platform for logs, metrics, and security

Anand Gurumurthi, a Director of Engineering at Salesforce, is joined by Marcus Blankenship, a senior manager at Heroku Salesforce on the Runtime Networking Team. Their topic for this episode is to provide career advice for experienced engineers looking to advance their career. There are several all too common scenarios individual contributors face, which Anand and Marcus discuss and offer their perspectives for. These include learning how to ask overcoming bias on your own work and figuring out how to better assess your strengths and weaknesses. In addition, Marcus and Anand discuss getting over the fear of asking for help. They agree that showing an active interest in finding out how a system works is a good way to show that you're engaged in your work and want to grow. In summary, confidence in the workplace is the key to getting what you want. Whether you're looking for a promotion or want to better understand a problem, you are in charge of starting those conversations. In situations where you're looking for guidance, ask for specific feedback from people who want to help you.

Chris Castle is a developer advocate at Heroku and Salesforce. He is joined by Carter Rabasa, the lead organizer of CascadiaJS, as well as Julián Duque, a developer advocate here at Salesforce/Heroku who organizes NodeConf and JSConf in Colombia. Carter shares his first experiences at a tech conference, finding it to be surprisingly intimate and a great community of well-intentioned web developers that wanted to learn. He was inspired to start CascadiaJS, a JavaScript conference situated in the Pacific Northwest. Over time, he realized that it's the people and the networking opportunities that really makes CascadiaJS special. When COVID-19 made it clear that in-person events would not happen for 2020, he and his team struggled to figure out how to put on an event that their community would love. It required them to imagine a future where software to support their vision didn't exist yet. They became certain that the event would need to learn how to be virtual for a long time. They accepted this challenge, and set to work building a conference model that they felt was interactive and immersive. There was just a tremendous excitement and enthusiasm to see if they could do something that hadn't been done yet. Of course, they stumbled in several ways; there were issues sending swag to customers, for example. Still, there are many reasons to keep the virtual conference format. For one, it's more accomodating for people with physical accessibility issues as well as attendees all over the world. There's more flexibility in the timing of events, where speakers can just play their sessions one after another; attendees can hop between different workshops and talks at the click of a mouse. Julián agrees that CascadiaJS' hybrid format of a recorded talk followed by a live Q&A was great for engagement, as speakers were chatting with viewers as their session played. Overall, Carter is excited at future conferences having a serious virtual component to them. Links from this episode CascadiaJS 2020 went virtual-only for the first time We Need Better Virtual Dev Conferences article NodeConf and JSConf in Colombia are just two events grappling with the pandemic

Dr. Mireille Reece is a practicing clinical psychologist and, along with Adam Stacoviak, editor-in-chief of the Changelog, they run Brain Science, a podcast exploring behavior change and mental health. Chris Castle, a Developer Advocate at Heroku, continues a previous conversation with them on how to take care of one's mental wellbeing. Their discussion centers around the neuroplasticity of the brain, how new habits can be created and formed. One of the best antidepressants is exercise. Adam advises that it's not necessarily about physical fitness, but rather that your brain really needs that motion. It can serve to provide one with a different perspective. As well, activating any of your senses--smell, touch, and so on--can bring on a calming effect. Other suggestions include meditating, which can bring on a greater sense of self-awareness, and journaling, which can be helpful in tracking your thoughts over time. Dr. Reece advises that keeping tracking of your moods can help hone in on the source of negative emotions. It's all about cause and effect. For example, if you eat a lot of fried foods, it might taste good, but ultimately, there are long term health affects associated with it. It's not that our actions are bad or good, but about recognizing the effects of them. Once we hone in on unfavorable consequences, we can start the process of adjusting our behaviors away from their sources. Links from this episode Brain Science is a podcast exploring the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation & mental health Headspace and Calm are two apps which can help with mindfulness Day One is an app for journaling Essentialism is a book on "pursuing less" which Adam recommends

Dr. Mireille Reece is a practicing clinical psychologist and, along with Adam Stacoviak, editor-in-chief of the Changelog, they run Brain Science, a podcast exploring behavior change and mental health. Chris Castle, a Developer Advocate at Heroku, is interviewing them to find out more about the stigma associated with mental health. There's an acknowledgement that while everyone at one point or another struggles with their mental health--be it through anxiety, depression, isolation, or stress--we, as a society, tend to be hesitant to discuss our struggles publicly. Dr. Reece posits that people view this as a weakness, one they're not willing to admit. There's a fear that if you reveal this part of yourself, you'll be rejected. Chris points out that mental health is not like physical health: if you break a finger, you can go to a doctor and get a splint. But if you have some mental anguish, it feels like your very identity is hurting, and Dr. Reece concurs that there's no "quick fix" to the problem. The first step, however, is to differentiate that how you hurt is not equivalent to who you are. You have to admit that you don't have the tools or skills to resolve the problem on your own, which will inevitably lead you to wanting to find a solution in a therapist. The dialog concludes with a recognition that there are many different types of therapy available, and it can be overwhelming to identify the one that works for you. The important thing to do is to find someone you can trust, and have a conversation with, because you'll be more willing to act on their advice. This might also mean seeing multiple therapists before discovering one that "fits." Adam posits that it can be helpful to imagine a future version of yourself as an end goal, from which you can begin to work towards through changing your habits and behaviors. Links from this episode Brain Science is a podcast exploring the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation & mental health

Greg Nokes, Master Technical Architect at Heroku, is joined by Alex Broussard, the CTO of THINKMD. THINKMD is a technology company that's working to build next-generation clinical logic. The primary aim is to put healthcare tools in the hands of anyone, anywhere, but especially in places where healthcare access is limited. As Alex points out, the obvious challenge in such a platform is to optimize the application to work in low bandwidth settings. To work around this limitation, THINKMD designed their platform as a progressive web application, ensuring that, not matter what, it function as an "offline first" app. Data is collected and stored locally, and transmissions between the client and the server occur when Internet connectivity is restored. In addition to networking challenges, the functionality and the visual design of the app also has strict hardware limitations. The mobile devices running THINKMD are not smartphones, but rather older feature phones which lack touchscreens and keyboards. However, they're still very durable, with incredible battery life, and operate better under remote conditions. These phones run an operating system called KaiOS, which allows developers to build networked apps that run in Chrome browser environment. As well, THINKMD was founded by two doctors, which requires every update to the app to pass very rigorous clinical standards. Information that's presented cannot just have a good UX: it must also be accurate, as it's literally dealing with life or death situations. THINKMD's frontend runs on Vue.js. This choice was partially made because of Vuetify, which provides localization support, a component that's key to the app as it's used in over a dozen languages. By trusting how Vue and Vuetify support the look-and-feel of the app, Alex and his team can focus more on the backend data retrieval and delivery, including setting up duplicate servers across Asia and Africa to address latencies. For other teams who are building a multi-regional app targeted at low latency countries, Alex strongly suggests that you consider optimization techniques in advance of feature development. Links THINKMD's mission is to eliminate preventable deaths by increasing healthcare access via new and disruptive technologies KaiOS brings smartphone functionality to affordable devices

Greg Nokes is a Master Technical Architect at Heroku, and he's interviewing a returning guest, Ryan Townsend, the CTO of SHIFT Commerce. SHIFT Commerce is an e-commerce PaaS that provides an online space for businesses to host their websites and sell their goods. Their customers aren't exclusively virtual; some of them have brick-and-mortar shops which have had to shut down due to COIVD. As the volume of online ordering increased, some of these businesses noticed that their distribution centers couldn't keep up with the orders. This was due both to pent up demand as well as social distancing guidelines slowing the pace of operations. Working with these retailers, SHIFT Commerce came up with a rather simple solution: when an online order was placed, the platform would check to see whether a store closer to the customer already had the item they bought. If it did, then the customer would get their item shipped locally, rather than from the distribution center. This had several benefits: it saved the business money; it reduce emissions from vehicles driving all around the country; and it preserved the retail employees' jobs, as their tasks shifted from ringing up customers to selecting and packing shipments. Implementing the technical algorithm to perform this logic took just about a week; after that proof of concept, it took another four to six weeks to build a full fledged microservices that's completely API driven. The components used to design this were technologies that SHIFT Commerce had already invested in: Postgres, Redis, Apache Kafka, and so on. Ryan suggests that software companies always be prepared for unexpected changes, such as a new competitor entering the market. Having the flexibility to make decisions with agility helped SHIFT Commerce pivot and respond quickly to external changes, such as COVID. Links from this episode SHIFT Commerce delivers scalable e-commerce solutions Learn more about SHIFT Commerce in the Application Performance and Building SaaS on PaaS episode

Greg Nokes, Master Technical Architect at Heroku, is joined by Meg McLaughlin, THINKMD's Director of Research and Implementation. THINKMD is a technology company that's working to build next-generation clinical logic. The primary aim is to put healthcare tools in the hands of anyone, anywhere, but especially in places where healthcare access is limited. The platform starts by guiding a user to provide some initial data about who they are. It then goes on to take the medical history of the person being assessed. By comparing a person's history, symptoms, and habits against the result of broader community data, THINKMD analyzes and visualizes that data to present information like the overall population and individual health. Using a system called syndromic surveillance, THINKMD can look at incoming data to assess epidemics, such as malaria or COVID. By looking at trends of data over time, such as people's temperatures, syndromic surveillance can help identify potential cases and clusters, ultimately assisting health systems to manage where to allocate testing, equipment, or treatments. THINKMD is operating in over 13 countries--primarily in Africa and Southeast Asia--requiring the platform to target a variety of languages and cultures. Tracking data is just one part of THINKMD's mission; the other portion is providing education and support for their on-site partners. Establishing campaigns to distribute vaccines and educating the populace on sanitary practices are just some of the challenges they face. They solve these problems by working closely to transfer knowledge to individuals who the community trusts. Links from this episode THINKMD's mission is to eliminate preventable deaths by increasing healthcare access via new and disruptive technologies

Corey Martin is a Customer Solutions Architect at Heroku. He's interviewing Brandon Stewart, the founder and project lead of GNAR, and Yuri Oliveira, one of its software engineers. GNAR is a software consultancy, and one of their projects involves building an Internet of Things solution for RMS, a freight transportation company. Internet of Things is a broad term used to describe any object that can connect to the Internet or communicate with other devices; popular examples include the Next Thermostat or Amazon Alexa. For RMS, Brandon and Yuri built a system to monitor trucks transporting shipping containers. Without an IoT infrastructure, truck drivers would communicate with their managers via radio signal, to get a sense of the optimal routes to take or the next task to focus on. With GNAR's IoT setup, the trucks communicate with their home base wirelessly, and there's no ambiguity over what to prioritize. Managers can also take a look at monthly data to track productivity, as well as individual drivers' performance. This gives them insights into both broad analytics and live behavior. The team at GNAR uses Heroku Postgres, Heroku Redis, and Apache Kafka on Heroku to ingest, process, and store data. Placing their faith in Heroku's products lets them concentrate on building the unique aspects of their business, while offloading the DevOps responsibilities. For both Yuri and Brandon, the delight in working with IoT comes from using their abstract software development skills to affect changes in "the real world." Having that physical impact on a business' operations has been incredible to watch. Brandon believes that there are many industries that could benefit from incorporating IoT. He suggests that people interested in the space investigate industries, ask people questions, and see where opportunities can be found. Links from this episode GNAR is a software consultancy Learn more about how GNAR uses Heroku Discover how to run Apache Kafka on Heroku

Jason Salaz is a member of the Heroku support team, and he's leading a conversation with Daniel Klein, a software engineer at Landing. Landing is a network of pre-furnished apartments that provides its users with a lease-free place to live for as many months as they need to. As remote work has becoming increasing necessary, the people who use Landing are able to live in any city they feel like across America. Aside from a monthly rent and annual membership, there are no other fees. In addition to furniture, the apartments have kitchen and bathroom basics, and maintenance is taken care of 24/7. Obviously, Landing has been affected by COVID and the lockdowns, which has limited people's ability to travel. With restrictions slowly easing, they've been seeing growth returning. In particular, Daniel's noted that retirees make up the most surprising portion of their customer base. Older individuals with no job and the freedom to travel can visit cities which they've always dreamed of seeing. Links from this episode Landing is a network of fully furnished apartments in cities all across the country

Becky Jaimes is a Product Manager at Salesforce, and she's interviewing Nick Frandsen, a co-founder of Dovetail. Dovetail is a company that helps startups grow into ambitious technology companies. They do this by providing an independent team of designers and programmers that will help the startup with growth hacking and marketing. The goal is to help them build their company and scale it into something much larger than where they currently are. In exchange, they take a piece of equity in the company, resulting in a longterm partnership. Employees at Dovetail both have a salary and a stake in each of the companies they work with. When it comes to working with clients, there are a set of factors Nick and his team relies on. First and foremost, they only work with startups that already have funding and a strong founding team. Leaders with a large domain expertise provides Dovetail with confidence that VCs have done their share of research in believing in a startup's future success. At the beginning of the relationship, they'll work directly with founders, and even work on hiring world class talent to achieve their goals. They'll set milestones together and Dovetail will step up to do the work wherever the startup might lack the experience or people power to complete them. Startups typically witness the benefit of the Dovetail relationship as more user engagement accrues, which helps to establish a longer term relationship. Yeah, we, we get quite a few. I mean, we have an investing framework where we sort of look for a range of different factors. I mean, some of them are the same things that I guess a lot of VCs are looking for. We're looking for a really strong founding team, people that have succeeded in the past, people that have been able to do a lot of interesting successful things in their past, and generally people that have sort of a lot of expertise in a certain area. One of the things that we really like is people that have a huge amount of domain expertise in something. We actually often like things that are not purely software, so something where there's either difficult barriers to entry or another thing that we like is sometimes we get founders coming to us with relatively obscure industries that we don't really know much about initially, but then we start looking into the industry and it turns out that it's enormous and that there are not tons of really modern companies operating in that industry. One of the things that I think is really important and actually often kind of under appreciated in our industry is just the importance of sales and marketing, especially in startups. The technology is really important, there's no doubt about it, but we see a lot of young companies that are strong in the technology side, but they really haven't put as much effort into how they're going to sell this product, how they're going to market it. It's kind of been an after thought. It's page seven of the pitch deck, but really without sales and marketing, you're not going to build the traction that you need. You're not going to get enough customers to get the feedback from them to raise further investment. I mean, in some ways, it's kind of annoying. I wish you could just build an awesome product and go from there. But that sales and marketing really is hugely important. Most of the companies in Dovetail's client list are FinTechs based out of Australia, but they have recently expanded to the U.S. Dovetail's business results eventually become aligned with the performance of the companies they work with, which positions them less as an agency. Their model requires a lot of discipline and investment, not just financially, but also strategically: both halves are continuously improving along the journey towards bigger growth. Links from this episode Dovetail is a full-service product development studio specializing in building digital products that scale

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 single page apps, leading to Angular, Ember, and eventually, React. For many people involved in (and observing) the JavaScript community, the pace of change induced a certain amount of uncertainty as to which framework developers should be learning. Ben empathizes with this frustration, but cautions that software development really hasn't changed in the last twenty years. Every time a brand new language or tool comes out that promises to revolutionize the industry, it's better to wait it out a year before even considering putting it into production. Better still, take a step back and ask how this new tool will make your app better for your users. When you approach software development as a way to solve people's problems, you become more pragmatic in your choices, and can work to solve real problems, rather than overoptimize or get distracted. Ben concludes by observing how designers have become much more technical over the last few years, with tools like Abstract introducing the concept of branches to design files, or the relationship between Figma and Sketch to actual code. Teams are no longer making mock-ups and handing them over to "real programmers" but actually building the components themselves, in reusable and shareable ways. Ultimately, he sees programming drifting more towards the full stack approach: in order to be able to build a good product, you need to understand how to implement features on a server, design it in a user friendly way, and apply JavaScript effectively to communicate with the backend and the browser.

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 operations requirements. Salesforce was interested in Heroku precisely because they shared the same belief: that developers should concentrate on writing software, and leave the lower tier concerns to someone else. Now, the conversation has shifted. Companies who use Salesforce might not know how Heroku can help them. They've accumulated all of this data, about their customers or their business, and Heroku can provide them with an easy way to gain insights about that data. Perhaps they want to set up a workflow to pass sensitive information to other people. Salesforce can provide an SSO login system, sharing rules for the data, and other business logic; a simple app built in any mainstream language can run on Heroku to ingest that data. Greg and Chris both understand how levels of abstraction that cloud services provide can be perceived as "dangerous" models in several ways. By offloading concerns to other platforms, developers sometimes feel like they're not "really" developing; worse, they might believe that if they're not in total control of every aspect of the application, they'll eventually run into shortcomings. These fears are valid, but the industry as a whole has been embracing cloud services more and more as organizations realize that they can be most efficient when they focus on what matters to their core business. Links from this episode Trailhead is an online platform offering a variety of developer curriculums

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 thinking went that the better your metadata, the more likely your website was going to appear higher in search results. But these days, SEO is more about how users navigate sites. Justin and Michael explain how if you create a site with a user's experience in mind, the search bots and algorithms will rank you more favorably. You can use proper semantic HTML, provide accessibility through labels and aria tags, or define consistent URL routes; but you can also minimize frontend JavaScript dependencies to ensure that your page loads quickly. Organizations are investing more in frontend experiences more than ever before, from SPAs to even providing virtual and augmented reality experiences. Michael believes that developing sites with an SEO-first mindset almost inherently leads to a better product, because your performance and accessibility improvements will be noticeable to your users, even if you're trying to get better search ranks. In the end, both marketing needs--getting people to visit your site--and frontend development concerns--making sure people can use your site--are no longer two distinct issues. Links from this episode Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages Cause of a Kind provides web marketing services to organizations Smashing Magazine and A List Apart are only magazines on frontend development BrightEdge gives marketers real-time research, recommendations, and rankings

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 career, he believed that the only way people could align together was to establish stringent processes. This could take innocuous forms such as "No Meeting Mondays" or mandating formal summaries after every meeting. But now he recognizes that a culture of creative freedom within teams often results in more organic unity. Creating this organization requires clearly stated goals and trusting that individuals will be able to execute on them. There also seems to be an artificial tension between synchronous and asynchronous workflows. Badri argues that instead, organizations should recognize that each style of work comes during different periods. Synchronous workflows are often best defined at the beginning of a spring, where product managers, designers, engineers and the like can discuss what problem they're trying to solve. Asynchronous workflows can then go and implement solutions, review code, and ship deployments. Moving past this false dichotomy lets people talk to each other when they want to, not because they need to. Video chats then take the space of being a communication system people look forward to having with each other, rather than a meeting that they are expected to participate in. Links from this episode Jamm provides video collaboration for remote teams

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 developers to ingest data, process them, and handle traffic in more efficient ways. J.T.'s book is all about how to move from small datasets to larger ones. He lays out three stages which every project goes through. In the first phase, a developer can solve a problem on their individual PC. This stage typically deals with datasets that are manageable, and can be processed with the compute hardware on hand. The second phase is one in which you still have enough compute power on your laptop to process data, but the data itself is too large. It's not unreasonable for machine learning corpus to reach five terabytes, for example. The third phase proposed is one where an individual developer has neither the compute resources to process the data nor the disk space to store it. In these cases, external resources are necessary, such as cluster computing and some type of distributed data system. J.T. argues that by exercising good programming practices in the first phase, the third "real world" phasing will require little modification of your actual data processing algorithms. Links from this episode "Mastering Large Datasets with Python" teaches you to write code that can handle datasets of any size Amazon EMR is a popular way to parallelize data processing in the cloud

Lenora Porter is a Front-End Engineer at Heroku, and she's joined by Sejal Parikh, who is a Product Manager for developer-focused content at Salesforce. Sejal started her technical career in QA, before transitioning into freelance (then full-time) technical writing. When she started her tech writing career, she really had no idea that the field existed, much less what it entailed. She grew to love the role, and the way it called upon her skills of writing and technical knowledge. Technical writers can be grouped into writing for three categories of users: end users, who need help with user interfaces; administrators, who configure what features are available for an organization's users; and developers, who use APIs to build their own tooling and workflows. In essence, technical writers craft content so that users don't end up stuck whenever they need to solve a problem. These writers often need more sophisticated and complex tooling than word processing software to publish their work. Even for the writers working with APIs, a background in development is not necessary to be a technical writer. Good use of language and an interest in helping others is enough. When Sejal was starting her career transition, she found plenty of videos on YouTube to help break down the tasks a technical writer might face. She also attended several conferences, and spoke to writers around her, to get a better sense of what the work entailed. Links from this episode Sejal volunteered for many years with the Ratan Tata Trust OpenAPI and RAML are just two of the formats used for documenting APIs The Society of Technical Writing and Write The Docs offer resources for aspiring tech writers

Rick Newman, a Director of Engineering at Salesforce/Heroku, is interviewing Yotam Hadass, the VP of Engineering for Electric, about team productivity. Agile development has been a popular way for teams to plan and execute on strategies, but it's come under criticism lately for being too dogmatic and rigid. Yotam and his team advocated for a different approach: operational agility. A core tenant of operational agility is embracing the idea of iteration. The goal is simple: make a plan, come up with some metrics for what a successful execution of that plan looks like, and when you're done, to review what you've accomplished and where you can improve. This "build, measure, learn" loop runs contrary to the misguided notion that the processes you operate under are forever set in stone. To start introducing operational agility in your practices, Yotam suggests you first identify what makes your team most productive. For example, it could be your sprint planning processes, development workflows, CI/CD, architectural designs, and even the developer experience that your engineers face looking at the code base. You would continue to ask questions as to which of these are working and which are not, gather new feedback, attempt to resolve them with new strategies, and then continue to iterate on your process. Although the idea is simple, there can be several challenges to shifting completely to such a different operational approach. First and foremost, it takes time to get started. You need to schedule conversations with every team, decide which questions to ask about your processes, have a strategy on how you're receiving those responses, and finally, turn them into decisions and action. Yotam believe that it takes commitment to proceed from there. From there, you also need to devise a common set of metrics, so that different teams aren't tracking "success" distinctly from the company as a whole. Still, Yotam says that for distributed teams, this common language of working has served Electric very well, in comparison to the top-down managerial approach many companies retain.

Charlie Gleason, Jennifer Hooper, David Routen, Satoshi Nagano, and Chris Castle talk about their various roles in the production of Code[ish], whether that's serving as a host, mixing the audio, or handling the design. The idea for Code[ish] started many years before the first episode was ever recorded. The name came about from the desire to produce a show that was "sort of" about code. From the get go, it was important for Jennifer and the rest of the team to identify several categories which episodes could be placed into: Dev Life (about people and activities), Tips and Tools (about physical and technical tools), Deeply Technical (deep dives into technology), and Heroku in the Wild (how Heroku is being used in production). These tags helped establish a framework very early on. Although everyone loved the idea, there was a lot of work to be done in the beginning. Someone with audio experience was necessary to suggest equipment and ways to mix the sound. It took a while for the release cadence to get right, because it became very apparent early on that the goal of two episodes a week was too much. And Code[ish] JP, which is a Japanese-language version of the podcast, was also figuring how it should be produced. Little by little, and with encouragement from others at Heroku, both podcasts found their footing. Producing a podcast is all about listening to questions and ideas, and filtering them into a narrative that makes sense. You have to pair hosts that are passionate about the subject at hand, so that the conversation appears natural, not just a question and answer session. On the technical side, listen to other podcasts and identify what you like about them. Last but not least, always try to learn and improve, by taking listeners' feedback to heart. Links from this episode Adobe Audition, Zencastr, and Simplecast is some of the software used to produce the show This XKCD comic shows the importance of sanitizing inputs

Chris Castle is a developer advocate at Heroku, and he's interviewing Jonathan Lister Parsons, the CTO from PensionBee. PensionBee operates in the fintech sector, and focuses on bringing a stellar experience for workers managing their retirement funds. PensionBee deals with an industry that is very reliant on paper and ink, and has sought to bring fund management in the UK out of the 19th century and into the 21st. PensionBee's efforts to change an outdated model isn't just limited to their external business. They also find ways to use technology to improve their company culture. Jonathan believes that technology is at the core of any attempt to reach one's goals. He points out that while many companies say that customer success is their greatest priority, those efforts are often limited in their scope. In order to bring visibility into how they're doing as a company, PensionBee funnels all feedback from their website and apps into a Slack room. When positive praise comes in, teammates celebrate each other. When negative experiences occur, support and engineering band together to address the customer's concerns. Most software isn't made by people with empathy for their users' goals. All too often, they're built by organizations who are motivated by things other than ensuring user efficacy and contentment. Meanwhile, people are still using tools and processes that are too complex and confusing. There's an innate problem in the corporate world, where decades of investment in IT have still resulted in stagnant productivity rates. For Jonathan, PensionBee striving to resolve that paradox both helps his business and provides a much needed service to its users. Links from this episode PensionBee helps its UK users manage their pensions The slides from Jonathan's QCon conference talk Armie is PensionBee's robot that translates a users' digital signature into one on paper and ink

Esau Sanchez-Diaz is a Customer Success Director at Salesforce, and he is interviewing Amelia Winger-Bearskin, a developer evangelist at Contentful. Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a member of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma Deer Clan. She has been making art with computers for decades, starting with a Commodore 64 her father brought home one day. Amelia's work often examines the relationship between tech and her native roots. One such example is in her tribe's use of Wampum, which is a sort of contract recording all the activity between two nations. A wampum is comprised of beads of different colors which signal when and between whom an event. As a wampum can span many decades, Amelia relates it to something like the blockchain. Each transaction that occurs on the blockchain is immutable, and since it cannot be tampered with, a history of the movement of data is recorded for all participants. Some of her projects, like the 3D Beadwork, are just a natural 21st century extension of traditional artisan practices. Through her work, Amelia has been able to build a large cohort with other indigenous people in tech. In order to amplify their visibility, she runs a podcast called Wampum.Codes about the projects they are building. Mentorship is an important topic for Amelia. She's worked as a professor of animation, and is helping to show the newer generation that a career in the tech industry is possible. Her job as a developer evangelist has helped her hone the necessary skills of meeting strangers and finding common bonds with them. She views her outside mentorship as opportunities to transfer the knowledge she's gained in the industry and to become a good community member. Links from this episode wampum.codes is Amelia's podcast interviewing native and indigenous people making cool things with new technologies The Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab researches and incubates alternatives to a singular authorial vision, through a constellation of media methods AISES is a national, nonprofit organization focused on substantially increasing the representation of indigenous peoples of North America in STEM studies and careers Sundance Institute is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the discovery and development of independent artists and audiences

Chris Castle, a Developer Advocate with Heroku, is joined by Tobie Langel, a longtime web developer and member of the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. The W3C is an organization where the standards that define the web are being built. It's a consortium of different industry players, like browser vendors,universities, and governments. These different stakeholders come together and decide how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript API should behave. The W3C effectively lays the groundwork for browsers to agree on how a website should look and behave. They do this through long, thought out processes of standardization. If each browser ends up implementing its own HTML tags or CSS rules, then the web would become fragmented, as sites would require you to use a specific browser. For something to become a W3C recommendation, two different browsers with different code bases need to successfully implement a specification. This is done to build confidence around an idea, to ensure that browser vendors understand it, as well as to identify ways which frontend developer will make use of the new technology. Much of the conversation between Tobie and Chris goes over how, exactly, this timeline works in practice. Links from this episode W3C is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web Specref is an open source database of web standards PR Preview adds preview and diff to spec pull requests.

Julián Duque, is a Lead Developer Advocate at Heroku. He's interviewing Matt Pfaltzgraf, the CEO at Softgiving, and Brian Wetzel, its CTO. Softgiving is fundraising platform that allows influencers—whether on Twitter, Instagram, Twitch, or other live streams—to create custom campaigns to raise funds for causes they care about. This is done through custom overlays, as well as rewards and gamification. They're also very hands-on with the content creators they work with, dealing with everything from the design to fundraising goals to determining the incentives for donators. Providing this level of customer service has been both their distinguishing factor as well as the most challenging part of their work. As demand for their platform has grown, it's required them to scale up their processes massively. They've been able to do this by keeping the processes lean, allowing them to iterate rapidly. Their close collaboration with streamers and charities has enabled them to be experts in both what people need and which groups need the most help. Similarly, their tech stack and app are kept very lean. Anything not essential to the Softgiving platform is handed over to another service, such as payment processing. Links from this episode Softgiving is a platform for influencers to fundraise for their favorite causes The Givinga Foundation provides the data on charities for Softgiving

Robert Blumen is a DevOps engineer at Salesforce interviewing Doug Fawley, a software engineer at Google. Doug is also the tech lead for the Golang implementation of gRPC. RPC, in general, is a system which enables any client and server to exchange messages. gRPC is Google's extension to the protocol, with support for more modern transports like HTTP/2. This allows for features like bidirectional streaming and stream multiplexing. It also enables better interoperability with load balancing, tracing, health checking, and authentication. To get started with gRPC, you would define your services and your messages using a language independent schema IDL protobuf. By explicitly stating what data you expect to receive, respond with, and error on, you can build a more reliable way of communication. In fact, many microservices have moved towards gRPC communication as opposed to something like REST, because of this level of introspection. gRPC is not technically a standard; it is, however, open source, and many languages have implementations against its spec. There's a very active community building tooling and resources, and for that reason, many of the largest software companies in the world have begun to implement it for their services. You can reach Doug on GitHub @dfawley. Links from this episode gRPC is a high-performance, open source universal RPC framework. protobuf is a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. gRPC web provides a JavaScript library that lets browser clients access a gRPC service. GRPCurl is a command-line tool that lets you interact with gRPC servers.

Erin Allard is a Platform Support Engineer at Heroku, and she's leading a conversation with Jace Bryan (who works on the Customer Centric Engineering team at Salesforce.org), Eric Routen (a family medicine resident in the New York area), and Bryan Vanderhoof (a manager on Heroku's runtime team). Each of these individuals come from different backgrounds, but they are united together in the larger LGBTQ community. After they came out, they sought ways to support other LGBTQ individuals who were not given the same opportunities as they were. Bryan focuses on helping homeless individuals, many of whom are children kicked out of their homes for being queer; Eric helps LGBTQ youth with job preparedness and substance abuse disorders; Jace shares their story of homelessness to college degree as a means of inspiring others to never give up. With respect to intersectionality, each of the speakers identifies that they are but a sliver of the communities they represent. It's important for them to acknowledge their own privileges, while at the same team being an ally for voices not at the table. Everyone goes through challenging experiences, but it's important to continue to show empathy towards others who need help too. One way to do that is to continue to volunteer, or at least, reach out to communities, and learn for yourself what problems they have. Uplifting those who don't look like or feel like you is one of the aims of Pride Month. Links HRC's Glossary of Terms helps you understand LGBTQ terminology The Night Ministry is an organization devoted to mitigating the suffering of homeless people in Chicago Ali Forney Center is an organization that helps people with job preparedness WeAreAmplify.org focuses on advancing empowerment through education and community for underrepresented individuals Power Of Us Hub is an online community for Salesforce.org customers, certified partners, and staff Salesforce Pride 2020 provides items for purchase, with all proceeds donated to four different non-profit organizations around the globe