All Heroku Episodes
A collection of podcasts with Heroku engineers, developers, and product managers.
Episodes
![Code[ish]](https://www.heroku.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/codeish-cover-art.png?w=300)
We're fortunate to live in an age with access to nearly unlimited resources for information. Sometimes, though, reading a tutorial isn't enough: you've got to see how someone builds something to fully grasp it. Geoffrey Grosenbach certainly thought so. Back in 2006, he built PeepCode and sold screencasts guiding watchers through his work building Ruby on Rails apps. He's currently at Hashicorp as their Director of Product Education. He joins Mike Mondragon on this episode to talk about launching a business aimed at developers, and how he learned to teach others.
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When you're one of the largest telecommunications companies in Canada, you're responsible for building and maintaining services that can handle a volume of data many times greater than the average web server. Julián Duque had a chance to sit down with Luca Maraschi, a chief architect at TELUS Digital, during NodeConfEU. On this episode, they talk about the frameworks and tech stack Luca has chosen to build the service mesh which facilities data flow between their microservices and clients.
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Heroku applications big and small run on dynos, virtualized Linux containers fine-tuned to execute your code. As the load on a server increases, you must add dynos to keep up with demand—but how do you know how many more to add? And how can you be sure that you are saving costs by reducing the amount of dynos after spikes in traffic settle? To solve that problem, Adam McCrea developed Rails Autoscale, a Heroku add-on that auto-scales Rails apps hosted on Heroku. He'll talk with Corey Martin about how he came up with the idea, how he built it, and how he got word out amongst his network to make it a must-have add-on.
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Chris Castle has a two year nephew who, like most two year olds, likes pushing buttons—especially ones that turn lights on. When a Christmas tree appeared a few weeks ago, and lights were put up, he was very excited. At the same time, Chris was experimenting with Puck.js, a programmable low-power bluetooth button, and had a brainwave—he could combine his nephew's love of buttons and of lights. A true Christmas miracle.
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Errors are a fundamental part of the programming experience. Learning how to receive and react to them, as well as responding to the user who may have encountered one, is essential to building a great application experience. Ruben Bridgewater, a core member of the Node.js team, talks us through various error handling strategies, both those that are specific to JavaScript as well as those applicable to anyone building a production-grade service.
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Running a start-up is hard. Running a start-up with teammates spread across the world is even harder. Juan Pablo Buriticá is the VP of engineering at Splice. He believes there's a fallacy that remote teams ought to be treated differently than non-remote ones. He argues that, given enough time, every team becomes distributed, whether that means they're in a different room or office or floor or country. He expounds on this philosophy, as well as how to set up your team for success early, whether they're comprised of four or four hundred people.
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NodeConf EU is one of the main conferences for the Node.js community. Community members from all over the world share their projects, leader workshops, and discuss the direction of the world's most popular programming language. congregate to discuss best practices, upcoming language changes, cool implementations, and more. Julián Duque chats with several attendees about what they're working on.
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One factor to consider when designing an application is how to represent information about events that occur. One traditional way is to use a database: as new events occur, a row in a table is updated. Another approach is to use an event log: every event that occurs is retained in a serialized format, so that app's state at any point in time is preserved.
On this episode Alexey Syomichev talks with host Robert Blumen about enterprise architecture organized around an immutable event log. The discussion covers the notion of events - what are they, what do they contain, event data, event schema, event formats; producers and consumers of events; the event log; time stamps versus event log time; immutability; durability of event logs; organizing enterprise architecture around the event log; the log-centric approach to integration compared to point-to-point; in place updates versus append only; extracting event logs from an RDBMS; reconstructing RDBMS change logs as business events; the event log as the system of record; making the event log highly available; scaling the event log.
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Mark Turner, an engineer at Heroku, joins the Software Engineering Daily show to discuss the architecture and engineering of a Layer 2 cloud provider, of which they were the first. Heroku is built on top of Amazon Web Services, and the core compute infrastructure is built on top of a pool of EC2 virtual machines that are continually scheduled with applications that users create on Heroku.
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Many organizations and teams have adopted Go for its focus on concurrency and efficiency, and Heroku is no different. Although it's no longer a "new" language, diving into Go can be intimidating, whether you're a seasoned programmer or a new hire. Johnny Boursiquot, Ed Muller, and Rishabh Wason discuss the joys and challenges of learning Go, applying it to projects at Heroku, and teaching colleagues how to write idiomatic code.
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In this episode, Adam talks to Alasdair Monk about how they approach CSS at Heroku, and how using a utility-based approach has kept their team happy for the last three years.
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Literature gets a bad rap for being too complicated, but it doesn't have to be. Over the years, various websites have sprung up to connect the confused with the clever. LitCharts aims to help by providing source text in one column, and a list of annotations, references, and explanations in another. We sat down with two members of the LitChart to discuss the technical challenges involved in building up a repertoire of literary knowledge.
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