The other day, I was sitting at my work desk feeling too sedentary, too isolated, and altogether too down about my restricted life during this coronavirus pandemic. Then, an email popped into my inbox from one of my favorite Heroku customers. Active for Good was announcing their latest activity challenge starting on May 1st. Every minute of exercise during the month of May counts towards unlocking lifesaving meals for malnourished kids. If there was ever a reason to get my sorry butt up out of my chair, this was it!

Food as prescribed medicine

To start with, Active for Good is easy to love. It’s a sister organization of MANA Nutrition, a nonprofit that manufactures ready-to-use...

This blog post is adapted from a discussion during an episode of our podcast, Code[ish].

Over the last twenty years, software development has advanced so rapidly that it's possible to create amazing user experiences, powerful machine learning algorithms, and memory efficient applications with incredible ease. But as the capabilities tech provides has changed, so too have the requirements of individual developers morphed to encompass a variety of skills. Not only should you be writing efficient code; you need to understand how that code communicates with all the other systems involved and make it all work together.

In this post, we'll explore how you can stay on top of the changing...

Text-based communication has a long history weaved into the evolution of the Internet, from IRC and XMPP to Slack and Discord. And where there have been humans, there have also been chatbots: scriptable programs that respond to a user’s commands, like messages in a chat room.

Chatbots don't require much in terms of computational power or disk storage, as they rely heavily on APIs to send actions and receive responses. But as with any kind of software, scaling them to support millions of user’s requests across the world requires a fail-safe operational strategy. Salesforce offers a Live Agent support product with a chatbot integration that reacts to customer inquiries.

In this post,...

Alex Hendricks turns up the radio in the cabin of his ‘91 Ford LT8501. He’s drowning out the noise of the construction crew 100ft ahead as they make progress on a brand new bridge in Waco, Texas. Alex isn’t here to take in the sight of fresh new infrastructure. He’s in his truck waiting for the go-ahead to deliver a payload of hot mastic asphalt to the bridge crew.

Alex has a ticket in his hands that needs a sign-off from the project’s contractor — a signature that proves he made his delivery, and on time. Without it, he doesn’t get paid, and the clock is ticking. Each ticket earns him about $60, and missing any of today’s three deliveries will start to make him sweat. His wife, at home...

A word of caution from a former AP Computer Science teacher who, with zero real-world programming experience, quit her dependable teaching gig to become a software engineer: Imposter Syndrome is never late to class.

When we grow competent in our craft, yet continue to feel unqualified for our role, that feeling is known as "Imposter Syndrome." The syndrome was with me before I started, it’s here with me now, and it will probably be with me for a long time to come.

If you’ve experienced it too, then reading that last sentence may leave you feeling pessimistic, grim even — as if we anticipate a future where we never feel completely worthy of our position in life. But to that, I...