Heroku Podcasts

Robert Blumen is a Dev Ops engineer at Salesforce. He's interviewing Alexey Syomichev, a software engineering principle architect at Salesforce, with over 25 years of experience. Their conversation begins with what constitutes an event (an immutable record encoding something that happened to an app). They then move on to describe consumers of those events, whether they're internal to an app or external to other services and business departments. Finally, they discuss ways in which you can store that event, either in a database or a running event log.

Databases and event logs each have their strengths and weaknesses, which Alexey enumerates. Event logs, for example, are easier to...

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.

Johnny Boursiquot is an SRE at Heroku, and joining him on this episode are Ed Muller (one-time Go language owner at Heroku), and Rishabh Wason, an engineer fresh out of university. Ed initiates the conversation by talking about how Heroku rolls out buildpack updates to users that are concurrent with Go releases.

Heroku is a polyglot organization, and Go is being used as one of its four primary languages. It's finding its way into backends, microservices, and services which communicate with each other. Since many engineers at Heroku have experience in multiple languages, it's become essential for Go experts to teach others how to write idiomatic Go code. Part of this is done...

Casey Faist, Heroku's Python Buildpack Maintainer, sits down with Justin Kestler, the co-founder of LitCharts, and Devyn Gasperini, one of its full stack web developers. They discuss the genesis of the project, and how it's really an evolution of Web 2.0 sites such as SparkNotes. LitCharts differentiates itself by providing modern English translations of well-known literary works, as well as color highlighting and annotating content word by word. Through a clever use of hyperlinks, they can also cite intrareferential and interreferential materials. This has the end result of producing thorough analyses between 8,000 and 10,000 words.

Much of the work developing LitCharts has...

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.

Topics include:

• Why Heroku introduced BEM to try and solve their CSS issues and why it didn't work
• How custom tooling and Ember's component system alleviated any maintainability concerns about littering the HTML with presentational classes
• Why Heroku still uses some component classes like "btn" and "input" even though they could encapsulate those in an Ember component
• Why simply introducing any sort of rigid CSS architecture wasn't enough and why switching to a utility CSS approach...