Heroku Podcasts

The web started off weird, and there’s a wonderful and concerted effort to ensure that, at least parts of it, stay that way.

Heroku designer Charlie Gleason and lead strategist Stephen Barlow dive into their experiences working on side projects—small, silly, funny, and emotive vignettes on the web—that span random Arrested Development episode selectors, Kanye West browser-based mini games, collaborative art projects, and everything in between.

Learn how to get involved with your own community of makers, why it’s more important to have fun than it is to try and get internet famous, and some things to look out for when working with others.

So, put away the kanban board, get inspired, and...

Chris Castle continues his conversation with Claire Lee, the head of the early stage group at Silicon Valley Bank. In this half, Claire begins by providing hard data that indicates companies which are founded by individuals from diverse backgrounds are wildly profitable. She goes on to say that conversely, the members in the top VCs firms are of a disproportionate make-up. She concludes that in order for more funds and ancillary services to be available to start-up founders, the individuals distributing the capital also needs to change, in order to give everyone a fair shot at success.

Claire goes on to point out that in addition to money, mentorship is a valuable (and limited) resource...

Chris Castle sits down with Claire Lee, the head of the early stage group at Silicon Valley Bank. Claire discusses the various startups she is involved with across various sectors, such as cleantech, fintech, and healthcare. Much of the conversation revolves around her experience at Recode's Code Conference 2019 and three lessons she took away from her attendance.

First, media platform companies such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter need to make large changes to become more transparent. Their user base is losing trust due to the persistent problems of hostile environments, hate speech, and misinformation.

The second takeaway was on the role of technology throughout our lives. For...

Matte Noble is a Senior Software Engineer at Sentry, an application with the capability to stitch together different developer tools through their APIs. For example, an exception that occurs in your application can be automatically represented as an item in your project management tool's backlog. On top of this, Sentry provides a platform for tools to also integrate with. Matte identifies his past work experiences as leading him to conclude that when building an application like this, it's important to consider your two types of users as having distinct concerns: one group is content with using the product as-is, and another group is the set of developers who are building tooling...

Chris Castle sits down with Shirley Xu, who went through a coding bootcamp, and Eric Chen, who is a recent graduate, to talk about their journey into their first programming jobs at Heroku. For both of them, the experience of programming in a day-to-day role is vastly different than what they experienced at school; namely, rather than analyzing algorithms, they were exposed to Ruby, Rails, and entire groups of people involved in shipping features. They recognize that they went through a period experiencing imposter syndrome, before realizing that every developer, no matter their status, shares those same feelings.

Certain soft skills were also acquired. Eric learned how to move past his...