Every organization needs to be data-driven in order to be successful. Whether you're tracking an application's performance, incoming support tickets, or revenue rates, different components of any company depend on metrics that inform the health of the business.

At Heroku, we're hackers to the core, but that doesn't mean we're all programmers. We build on top of our own platform for everything we do, and one of the products we often use is Heroku Dataclips. If you haven't heard of them before, Heroku Dataclips allow you to create SQL queries in a web GUI that run on your Heroku Postgres database. The unique dataclip URL can then be shared internally or externally,...

For quite some time we've received reports from our larger customers about a mysterious H13 - Connection closed error showing up for Ruby applications. Curiously it only ever happened around the time they were deploying or scaling their dynos. Even more peculiar, it only happened to relatively high scale applications. We couldn't reproduce the behavior on an example app. This is a story about distributed coordination, the TCP API, and how we debugged and fixed a bug in Puma that only shows up at scale.

Connection closed

First of all, what even is an H13 error? From our error page documentation:

This error is thrown when a process in your web dyno accepts a connection, but then...

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Ali Hamidi at Data Council SF '19 titled "Operating Multi-Tenant Kafka Services for Developers on Heroku."

What is Duke? No one knows his species or genus. People say he’s a Java Bean or a Software Agent, but all we know for sure is that he reminds us of the more than twenty-year legacy of the Java language and its community. The Java community has such an affinity for Duke that designers have created surfing Duke, astronaut Duke, rockstar Duke, macramé Duke, and of course Heroku’s Samurai Duke.

But how can all of these Duke variants exist without violating copyright or trademark laws? After all, Duke represents the language at the middle of one of the fiercest copyright battles in the history of software. The answer, it turns out, can teach us a great deal about how to nurture an open source...

Pride is a word with many meanings. It can mean a job well done. It can mean satisfaction in who you are or what you stand for. For me, it is all of that and more. It is one of the values that runs deeply at Heroku and what keeps me here -- pride in the work we do, pride in how we do it, and most importantly, pride in our people. One of the most moving things I have seen this past month is this Heroku Pride wallpaper on peoples’ screens all around the office.

At this 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and the conclusion of Pride month, on the day after the Pride parade here in San Francisco and in so many other places far and near, big and small, we asked for reflections from our...