FY18 Q2 recap: Heroku Continuous Integration GA & Ephemeral Apps

ecosystem , Director of Product & Partnerships

Need to quickly catch up on this past quarter's announcements? Here are the top three topics to tune in on:

Heroku announced the general availability of continuous integration (CI) on May 18, 2017. This new feature creates copies of staging apps to run tests, then destroys the app and its add-ons. With Heroku CI, you will see an increase in the number of default ephemeral plan resources regularly provisioned on Heroku review and CI apps. Previously, these apps used the add-on plan configured for staging.

As developers adopt CI/CD workflows, temporary deployments are becoming increasingly common. When ephemeral apps and their associated add-ons are destroyed, these actions should not...


Announcing Heroku ChatOps for Slack

news , Sr Product Manager

Today we’re making our Slack integration generally available to all Heroku customers through the release of Heroku ChatOps.

ChatOps is transforming the way dev teams work, replacing the asynchronous communication and context-switching of traditional operations processes with a shared conversational environment so teams can stay focused, communicate in real-time, gain visibility, and speed joint decision making.

Having seen the benefits of Slack integration for managing our own apps, we wanted to make ChatOps easier to use and accessible to every dev team. Heroku ChatOps handles the complexity of user onboarding, authentication, and accountability between Slack & Heroku, and provides...


I recently demonstrated how you can use Rack Mini Profiler to find and fix slow queries. It’s a valuable tool for well-trafficked pages, but sometimes the slowdown is happening on a page you don't visit often, or in a worker task that isn't visible via Rack Mini Profiler. How can you find and fix those slow queries?

Heroku has a feature called expensive queries that can help you out. It shows historical performance data about the queries running on your database: most time consuming, most frequently invoked, slowest execution time, and slowest I/O.

expensive_queries

Recently, I used this feature to identify and address some slow queries for a site I run on Heroku named CodeTriage (the best way to...


On the Rise of Kotlin

news , Software Architect

It’s rare when a highly structured language with fairly strict syntax sparks emotions of joy and delight. But Kotlin, which is statically typed and compiled like other less friendly languages, delivers a developer experience that thousands of mobile and web programmers are falling in love with.

The designers of Kotlin, who have years of experience with developer tooling (IntelliJ and other IDEs), created a language with very specific developer-oriented requirements. They wanted a modern syntax, fast compile times, and advanced concurrency constructs while taking advantage of the robust performance and reliability of the JVM. The result, Kotlin 1.0, was released in February 2016 and its...


It’s been a little over a year since our last Happy Node Hackers post, and even in such a short time much has changed and some powerful new tools have been released. The Node.js ecosystem continues to mature and new best practices have emerged.

Here are 8 habits for happy Node hackers updated for 2017. They're specifically for app developers, rather than module authors, since those groups have different goals and constraints:


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