2017 was a great year for Heroku and our users. We want to thank each of you for your feedback, beta participation, and spirit of innovation, which inspires how we think about our products and evolve the platform.

In the past year, we released a range of new features to make the developer experience even more elegant. We bolstered our existing lineup of data services while providing security controls for building high compliance applications on the platform.

With that, we’d like to take a moment and share some of the highlights from 2017. We hope you enjoy it, and we look forward to an even more exciting 2018!

Heroku has a strong tradition with open source projects. Engineers have dedicated countless hours to the projects that developers count on every day. Open Source Software is in our DNA.

Speaking personally, I’m passionate about building tools like AFNetworking and cupertino, in order to help developers build insanely great experiences for mobile devices. It’s with great pleasure that I introduce something new I’ve been working on:

Helios is an open-source framework that provides essential back-end services for iOS apps. This includes data synchronization, push notifications, in-app purchases, and passbook integration. It allows developers to get a client-server app up-and-running while...

When we think of the concept of Waza (技) or "art and technique," it's easy to get caught up in the idea of individual mastery. It's true that works of art are often created by those with great skill, but acquiring that skill is neither solitary nor static. Generations of masters contribute to a canon and it is in that spirit that we built the Heroku platform and the Waza event. This year's Waza was no exception.

On February 28th, more than 900 attendees participated in Waza including Ruby founder Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, Django co-creator Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Codeacademy’s Linda Liukas. True to form, we offered you a platform for experimentation and...