Heroku Podcasts

Terraform is an open source project to help automate the provisioning of infrastructure resources and services for your application. It integrates with cloud platforms through open source plugins, called providers. Mars Hall is a Heroku engineer that works on the Heroku provider. Rather than using a CLI or a web UI, Terraform provides a platform-agnostic configuration file written in the Hashicorp Configuration Language, or HCL. This sets Terraform apart from similar tools like Chef, which relies on Ruby, or Ansible, which only relies on provisioning server state.

The conversation veers towards the architecture of a provider and how individuals can contribute to the Heroku provider...

Léonie Watson does many things: she worked on overhauling the UK government's digital services, is on the W3C advisory board, acts as co-chair of the W3C web platform working group, is an advisor for Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages project, and also runs the Inclusive Design 24 conference. She also happens to be visually impaired. The show begins with how she went from drama school towards a career as a web programmer, and how she become a strong advocate for improving accessibility in web standards.

Léonie stresses that anyone can get involved in the decisions that power the web by contributing to the W3C's public conversations at GitHub. She details the lifecycle of a...

Designer and front end developer Charlie Gleason and developer David Routen are both on Heroku's marketing team, and both of them transitioned into the world of programming from disparate career paths. For them, moving into tech was about following their passion for creative problem solving. They did so by first creating a plan for what they needed to learn. After viewing several job postings, they got a sense of what skills each potential employer required, and then set about to learn them. Fundamentally, they believe that a strong grasp of the building blocks of the web, like HTML and CSS, plus at least one other higher level language (JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python), is a great way...

This episode begins with a roundtable introduction from five Herokai engineers who describe what motiviated them to speak at their first conference. If you're a first-time speaker, it's best to let conference organizers be aware of this, not only because they will support you, but also because they will try to give you a prime time slot in order to boost your message (and spirits).

The group then delves into how to prepare and practice for your talk. In general, they agree that improvising is not a good idea, unless you're absolutely an expert in the subject matter. You should also be able to account for the lack of Internet access, which means that live coding is also not...

For many years, Jeff Dickey was a lead architect for Heroku's CLI tool, which was used by application developers to get their apps deployed to Heroku's platform. He muses on his history with CLIs with Nahid Samsami, a director of product at Heroku, as the two of them worked together on oclif.

oclif was designed from the start to be a framework for developers to use when building their own command-line interfaces. It's currently written in TypeScript, but Jeff goes through its four-year history, starting with its roots in Ruby and on thorough its Frankenstein's monster mashup of Go and JavaScript. While each language had its pros and cons, the key constraint was how the...