At Heroku and at Salesforce, we’re always looking for ways we can help increase the number of young women with access to careers in science, technology, engineering and math. Recently, thanks to a Heroku engineering manager’s involvement on this issue with a local school, we hosted a Technovation Challenge event at the Heroku offices. We wanted to share the story about this great program - the Technovation Challenge is an annual competition, and you could do something similar in your community!

Some background

For the past 3 years, Heroku engineering manager Margaret Le has mentored a group of high school girls at the Immaculate Conception Academy (ICA), a San Francisco high school...

At Heroku, we love telling the stories of what our customers and partners build on the platform. We love it even more when we get a chance to talk to the development team behind a successful app. So we were excited to sit down with Steve Simpson, CTO of Ethos Solutions—a Heroku partner—to discuss how his team built the award-winning app and intelligence behind the Lynx SmartGrill.

Congratulations on your success working with Lynx on the SmartGrill project! Can you tell me a little about the SmartGrill app and how it helps its users?

The SmartGrill app is a native iOS and Android application that allows users to browse and cook recipes created specifically for their SmartGrill by...

Editor's Note: This is a guest post from Hursh Agrawal, co-founder of Branch.

At Branch, we’ve been through several feature launches on Branch.com and, more recently, several more on our new site, Potluck. Although it becomes easier, building high-quality, high-traffic web applications still isn’t easy. Here are a few things we’ve learned about hosting our apps on Heroku that have helped keep our latency down and our confidence up.

Building on Heroku

One thing that has been consistently helpful is not hosting services ourselves. Heroku provides a pretty extensive Add-on Marketplace you can use to get most services you’d need up and running in a matter of minutes.

At Branch, we use...