Progressive web apps enable websites to function more like native mobile apps in exchange for some flexibility. You get native mobile app functionality (or close to it) without all the overhead of app store approvals and tons of platform-specific native code. Users can install a progressive web app to their home screen and launch it just like a native app. However, the app is launched into a pseudo-app frame that has some restrictions and only allows access to pages that are sub-paths of the initial path of the...

The recent introduction of Platform Events and Change Data Capture (CDC) in Salesforce has launched us into a new age of integration capabilities. Today, it's possible to develop custom apps that respond to activity in Salesforce. Whether you're creating a memorable customer interaction or implementing an internal workflow for employees, consider an event-sourced design to improve responsiveness and durability of the app.

In this article, we'll look at an event-sourced app architecture that consumes the Salesforce Streaming API using the elegant jsforce JavaScript library in a Node app on Heroku.

Streaming with jsforce

In summer 2018, the open-source jsforce library...

Debugging is an important skill to develop as you work your way up to more complex projects. Seasoned engineers have a sixth sense for squashing bugs and have built up an impressive collection of tools that help them diagnose and fix bugs.

I'm a member of Heroku’s Ruby team and creator of CodeTriage and today we’ll look at the tools that I used on a journey to fix a gnarly bug in Sprockets. Sprockets is an asset packaging system written in Ruby that lies at the heart of Rails’ asset processing pipeline.

At the end of the post, you will know how Sprockets works and how to debug in Ruby.

Unexpected Behavior in Sprockets

Sprockets gives developers a convenient way to compile, minify,...

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Joe Kutner at Devoxx 2018 titled "10 Mistakes Hackers Want You to Make."

Building self-defending applications and services is no longer aspirational--it’s required. Applying security patches, handling passwords correctly, sanitizing inputs, and properly encoding output is now table stakes. Our attackers keep getting better, and so must we.

In this blog post, we'll take a look at several commonly overlooked ways to secure your web apps. Many of the examples provided will be specific to Java, but any modern programming language will have equivalent tactics.

1. Ensure dependencies are up-to-date

Every year, OWASP, a group of...

This blog post is adapted from a talk given by Stella Cotton at RailsConf 2018 titled "So You’ve Got Yourself a Kafka."