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Julián Duque

Principal Developer Advocate at Heroku
Heroku Staff

Julián is a Principal Developer Advocate at Heroku, with a strong focus on community, education, Node.js, and JavaScript. He loves sharing knowledge and empowering others to become better developers.

He spends most of his free time playing with his pets, Cumbia and Nefertiti, enjoying RPG video games, and serving as a Game Master (GM) for online Table-Top Roleplaying Games (TTRPG) campaigns.

Optimizing Enterprise Operations with Heroku’s Advanced Logging Features

Logging is the unsung hero of enterprise operations—quietly saving the day, one log line at a time. Imagine trying to maintain successful applications without knowing what’s happening inside them. This would be like flying a plane blindfolded at night, in a storm, with no instruments. Spoiler alert: Neither scenario would end well! Today’s distributed systems are massively complex. To develop and maintain them properly, your ability to capture, analyze, and act on log data becomes essential. You need good logging for the critical insights to help you: Diagnose and troubleshoot issues Rightsize cloud resources Ensure security In this post, we’ll…

How I Improved My Productivity with Cursor and the Heroku MCP Server

Generative AI has been one incredible tool to improve my productivity not only for work but for personal projects too. I use it every day, from generating stories and images for my online role playing games to solving code and engineering problems and building awesome demos. Lately I’ve leaned into Cursor as my go‑to AI coding companion. Its inline suggestions and quick edits keep me moving without context‑switching. Connecting Cursor to my apps through the Heroku MCP Server lets me perform actions like deploying or scaling, without leaving my code editor, making AI a first class citizen in the Heroku…

Best Practices for Optimizing Your Enterprise Cloud Applications with New Relic

If your cloud application performs poorly or is unreliable, users will walk away, and your enterprise will suffer. To know what’s going on inside of your million-concurrent-user application (Don’t worry, you’ll get there!), you need observability. Observability gives you the insights you need to understand how your application behaves. As your application and architecture scale up, effective observability becomes increasingly indispensable. Heroku gives you more than just a flexible and developer-friendly platform to run your cloud applications. You also get access to a suite of built-in observability features. Heroku’s core application metrics, alerts, and language-specific runtime metrics offer a comprehensive…

Testing a React App in Chrome with Heroku CI

When building web applications, unit testing your individual components is certainly important. However, end-to-end testing provides assurance that the final user experience of your components chained together matches the expected behavior. Testing web application behavior locally in your browser can be helpful, but this approach isn’t efficient or reliable, especially as your application grows more complex. Ideally, end-to-end tests in your browser are automated and integrated into your CI pipeline. Every time you commit a code change, your tests will run. Passing tests gives you the confidence that the application — as your end users experience it — behaves as…

Mastering API Integration: Salesforce, Heroku, and MuleSoft Anypoint Flex Gateway

In today’s fast-paced digital world, companies are looking for ways to securely expose their APIs and microservices to the internet. MuleSoft Anypoint Flex Gateway is a powerful solution that solves this problem. Let’s walk through deploying the Anypoint Flex Gateway on Heroku in a few straightforward steps. You’ll learn how to connect your private APIs and microservices on the Heroku platform through the Anypoint Flex Gateway and the Anypoint API Manager, without the hassle of managing infrastructure. Get ready to unlock the potential of this potent pairing and, in the future, integrate it with Salesforce. Introduction Salesforce’s ecosystem provides a…

Build Well-Documented and Authenticated APIs in Node.js with Fastify

If you’re an API developer working with Node.js, then you’re probably familiar with Express. But have you tried out the Fastify framework to build with power, speed, and convenience? In this walkthrough, we build a full-featured, easy-to-consume API with Fastify. And we deploy it to the cloud with ease. We show you how to: Get started working with Fastify to build an API Implement API authentication by using a JSON web token (JWT) Use Fastify’s Swagger plugins to generate an OpenAPI specification Consume the OpenAPI specification with Postman, giving you an API client that can send requests seamlessly to your…

Building a GPT Backed by a Heroku-Deployed API

How to connect your GPT on OpenAI to a backend Node.js app Late in 2023, OpenAI introduced GPTs, a way for developers to build customized versions of ChatGPT that can bundle in specialized knowledge, follow preset instructions, or perform actions like reaching out to external APIs. As more and more businesses and individuals use ChatGPT, developers are racing to build powerful GPTs to ride the wave of ChatGPT adoption. Source If you’re thinking about diving into GPT development, we’ve got some good news: Building a powerful GPT mostly involves building an API that handles a few endpoints. And in this…

Working with ChatGPT Functions on Heroku

How to Build and Deploy a Node.js App That Uses OpenAI’s APIs Near the end of 2023, ChatGPT announced that it had 100M weekly users. That’s a massive base of users who want to take advantage of the convenience and power of intelligent question answering with natural language. With this level of popularity for ChatGPT, it’s no wonder that software developers are joining the ChatGPT app gold rush, building tools on top of OpenAI’s APIs. Building and deploying a GenAI-based app is quite easy to do—and we’re going to show you how! In this post, we walk through how to…

Let’s Debug a Node.js Application

There are always challenges when it comes to debugging applications. Node.js' asynchronous workflows add an extra layer of complexity to this arduous process. Although there have been some updates made to the V8 engine in order to easily access asynchronous stack traces, most of the time, we just get errors on the main thread of our applications, which makes debugging a little bit difficult. As well, when our Node.js applications crash, we usually need to rely on some complicated CLI tooling to analyze the core dumps. In this article, we'll take a look at some easier ways to debug your…

Let It Crash: Best Practices for Handling Node.js Errors on Shutdown

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Julián Duque at NodeConf EU 2019 titled "Let it crash!." Before coming to Heroku, I did some consulting work as a Node.js solutions architect. My job was to visit various companies and make sure that they were successful in designing production-ready Node applications. Unfortunately, I witnessed many different problems when it came to error handling, especially on process shutdown. When an error occurred, there was often not enough visibility on why it happened, a lack of logging details, and bouts of downtime as applications attempted to recover from crashes. Julián:…

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