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If you’re building a customer-facing web app or mobile back-end, performance is a critical part of user experience. Fast is a feature, and affects everything from conversion rates to your site’s search ranking .

The first step in performance tuning is getting visibility into the app’s web performance in production. For this, we turn to the app’s logs.

Logs as data

There are many ways to collect metrics, the most common being direct instrumentation into the app. New Relic , Librato , and Hosted Graphite are…

On February 16th, we published a blog post outlining five specific and immediate actions we would take to improve our Rails customers' experience with Heroku. We want to provide you with an update on where these things stand. As a reminder, here’s what we committed to do:

Improve our documentation so that it accurately reflects how our service works across both Bamboo and Cedar stacks
Remove incorrect and confusing metrics reported by Heroku or partner services like New Relic
Add metrics that let customers determine queuing impact on application response times
Provide additional tools that developers can use to augment our latency…

The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users connected to the system, according to Metcalfe’s law. Jacob Kaplan-Moss , co-creator of Django , highlights this as a value in creating communities or as he puts it, “ecosystems”. In his talk at Waza last week on building ecosystems, he went on to highlight three key principles of creating ecosystems:

APIs to support extensibility
Conservatism as a value
Empowering the community

Whether building a platform or a framework, these key principles ring true. Check out his talk or read more on creating ecosystems below:

…

Matz , the creator of Ruby, spoke at Waza for the 20th anniversary of the language and the release of Ruby 2.0 . If you weren't in the sold out crowd, not to worry. Information should flow free and experiences should be shared; in line with those concepts you can watch Matz's talk right here, then read about what's new in this version of Ruby and how to run it on Heroku.

With slides available on speakerdeck

Keep reading for more information on Ruby 2.0 or check out our first batch of videos…

Great coders know their technology intimately. And they know how to choose it. Truly awesome application developers know more. They know the human side of technology. They know technique. They focus on their method—their practice.

In 2000 Heroku co-founder and CTO Adam Wiggins saw this more clearly than ever before. He read The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas . The book, as Adam explains in this thought-provoking (and method-shifting) Waza talk, showed him that his work could not only be about technology. It HAD to be about technique.

Heroku Co-founder, CTO and general badass,…

In planning Waza 2013 we went back to reflect on last year’s speakers. And we want to make the talks readily available to anybody who could not make it last year—or who wants a refresher. Check back soon for more talks from Waza 2012. And we hope to see you in person at Waza 2013 coming up FAST on Feb. 28 in San Francisco.

In a world of evolving languages, frameworks and development patterns, we developers must continually improve our craft. Innovative developers already have jumped on board many of these shifts. We’ve seen this…

Today our partner, New Relic , released an update to the Ruby New Relic agent that addresses issues brought up by our customers. The new version corrects how New Relic reports performance metrics for applications running on Heroku. Queueing time is now reported as the total time from when a request enters the router until the application starts processing it. Previous versions of New Relic only reported queueing time in the router. The new approach will result in more accurate queueing metrics that allow you to better understand and tune the performance of your application.

Update, Feb…