Heroku Podcasts

Charlie Gleason, a designer and front end developer at Heroku, interviews Luis Alvarez. Luis is a data analyst intern at Heroku, and he got there through his involvement in Year Up. Year Up is akin to a bootcamp for young adults, divided into two phases. The first six months are a process of learning and development. Year Up pairs your interests with hands-on training in various subjects, such as data analytics, IT, and project management. There's consistent feedback from your classmates and you're constantly being evaluated on your progress. After this assessment, Year Up pairs students with companies. For example, students who excelled in data visualization courses will be...

Julián Duque, a developer advocate at Heroku, interviews Nate Beck, the principal architect and founder of Pretzel Tech. Pretzel Tech is a company which has built Pretzel Rocks, a service that allows livestreamers to safely use licensed music. They do so by wrangling the needs of three different customters: broadcasters, who want to play fun music; record labels, which hold the rights to artists' music; and viewers, who want to play the same music at the same time as the broadcaster they are watching.

The technical ability to stream music is not terribly difficult; but the challenge lies in fanning that out, to thousands of listeners, all at once. When a streamer logs in, 20,000 users...

Parker Phinney, creator of Interview Cake, continues his discussion from a previous episode with Julián Duque, a developer advocate at Heroku. Interview Cake provides different interview questions and programming exercise that adapt to the programming language that a candidate is working on. Since their coursework is essential to helping users succeed, they made an effort to ensure that the work was done accurately.

First, they provided their entire course curriculum in Python, the programming language they were most familiar with. Then, they hired a team of language experts to convert those Python lessons into various other languages. Finally, they hired a second team of experts to...

Join Charlie Gleason, a designer and developer at Heroku, as he interviews two people representing The Difference Engine: Kimberly Lowe-Williams, its founder and Executive Director, and Rachel Marro, a recent graduate. The Difference Engine is a Chicago-based nonprofit with the goal of empowering professionals from nontraditional backgrounds to launch their careers in tech. They do this through an apprenticeship web development program, mock technical interviews, and ways to highlight their relevant experience.

Kimberley stresses that The Difference Engine expects applicants to have some familiarity with coding. The programs are designed to help adults with prior work experience navigate...

Erin Allard is a Platform Support Engineer at Heroku, and she's interviewing Ben Orenstein, one of the co-founders of Tuple. Screenshare was a popular pair programming app that was discontinued after being acquired by Slack. Finding no other alternative for this functionality, Ben and his friends built Tuple.

Ben spent much of the early months of Tuple investigating pricing strategies, because he understood that the business wouldn't exist unless he could charge a reasonable price customers would be willing to pay. This process also reduced the risk of their efforts, knowing that they could burn through months of savings with the likely goal of being able to turn a profit. To that...