Heroku Podcasts

Blaine Kaho`onei is an Alliances Director for Heroku; he also sits on the board for Purple Mai`a, an online learning platform bringing technology skillsets to the native Hawaiian community. He's joined in conversation by David Pickett, a software developer and lead instructor with Purple Mai`a, as well as Jennifer Hooper, Heroku's Technical Product Marketing, Content, and Brand Director, who has also volunteered at Purple Mai`a. Blaine begins the dialog by talking about his interest in bringing together Hawaii's rich history of innovation and technological development with its indigenous culture. There aren't many economic opportunities for native families in Hawaii, nor...

Sandy Lai is a customer solutions architect at Heroku, and she is interviewing two employees at Panorama Education: Ben Small, a software engineer, and Mitch Peabody, an engineering manager. Panorama is a platform designed to help educators, teachers, and principals, understand their students and their community by offering feedback surveys. As different schools have different technical expertise in their districts, Panorama caters its product to meet those needs. Different schools have different systems in place--sometimes as many as two or three different platforms in the same district--and Panorama built technology to pull that disparate data into one location to provide holistic (and...

Charlie Gleason, a designer at Heroku and Salesforce, sits down for a special conversation with Margaret Francis, the SVP of Platform Data Services. Their conversation is around the unavoidable topic of COVID-19, quarantines, and the disruptions to normal life around the world. Margaret starts the conversation by briefly contextualizing the event against two other catastrophes she experienced: the DotCom Crash of 2000, and the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008. While those two incidents had very real consequences to the tech, real estate, and banking industries, this current pandemic feels different, not the least of which being that every facet of life has been disrupted.

Despite this,...

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 customers: 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...