Yesterday, I took my rusty old bike out of the basement and rode through Golden Gate Park to Ocean Beach and back. The 6+ mile ride may seem short to some, but for me, it was something I never thought I’d be doing just a short time ago. I’m on a roll (literally!) that started at the beginning of May when I joined the “Active Together While Apart” activity challenge.

As I wrote about in my earlier blog post, Heroku customer Active for Good is working to fight severe acute malnutrition in children around the world with a unique program here in North America. The organization runs activity challenges that inspire people to get more exercise, and simply by doing so, contribute to their...

We are living in unprecedented times, and many of us are grappling with a really similar set of complicated and, at times exhausting, emotions. I've been thinking about this a lot since my conversation with Margaret Francis, the SVP of Platform Data Services at Salesforce and former Heroku GM, in our recent podcast for Code[ish].

At Heroku, we have gone from roughly over half of our team being remote, to all of our team being remote. We, along with people all over the world, have suddenly found ourselves working from living rooms, laundry rooms, gardens, garages, sheds, and kitchens. It can be overwhelming at times—learning new skills and adjusting old ones—so we wanted to step back...

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...

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...