Code[ish] – Détails, épisodes et analyse

The Code[ish] Podcast is back! Join Heroku superfan Jon Dodson and Hillary Sanders from the Heroku AI Team for the latest entry in our “Deeply Technical” series. In this episode, the pair discuss Heroku Managed Inference and Agents—what it is, what it does, and why developers should be using it. 

Hillary also shares tips for new developers entering the job market, and Jon pits 10 principal developers against one hundred fresh bootcamp graduates (hypothetically, of course).

A brand-new season of The Code[ish] Podcast is on the way! 

Loads of insightful episodes are on the way, featuring special guests from all corners of the Heroku community. 

This episode is a conversation led by Greg Nokes, a Product Manager with Salesforce, Dan Mehlman, a Director of Technical Architecture for Salesforce, Mike Rose, a Director of Technical Architecture for Salesforce, Jack Ziesing, a Technical Architect with Salesforce. They're interviewing Nick Sawhney, a college student who saw an opportunity to make his friends laugh and built something that grew beyond his wildest dreams. At the 2021 US Inauguration, a single shot of Bernie Sanders sitting in a chair captured the hearts of many on the Internet. People everywhere were photoshopping him in the unlikeliest of places. Nick utilized his Python skills and quickly built a Heroku app that would allow users to place Bernie anywhere in the world, by adding him to any image available on Google Street View.

To say the app was a success was an understatement. Inundated by tweets and distracted by press requests, Nick couldn't devote the time needed to keep the app stable and operational. He sent out a desperate tweet for help, only to be picked up by no less than Dan and Michael, who recruited Jack to help Nick with his operational issues. They paired together in a number of ways, optimizing Jack's Python code, securing its authentication logic, and autoscaling dynos in order to handle the waves of traffic. All of these rapid changes allowed Nick to step back and engage with fans on where they'd like to take Bernie next.

In addition to a newfound gratitude towards Heroku's team, Nick learned a few lessons from this experience. He was really humbled by the availability of the engineering community to donate their time and knowledge to help his issues. It's also inspired him to create videos to teach others how they can mitigate scaling issues in their architecture before it becomes a problem. He's also hoping to create some open source tools that to monitor things like server costs and availability issues for other small projects.

Aaron Schlesinger is the core maintainer on Athens, an open source on-prem module proxy. He walks through the history of packages and modules in Go, and introduces how Athens satisfies the needs of developers. Go modules allow you to serve up a Go project's dependencies via an API; Athens implements that API--and integrates with other implementations of the API as well--to simplify dependency management, no matter where the code is stored.

Beyang Liu is the CTO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, a company that focuses on developer tools. They use Go to build high-performance code search, code intelligence, and jump to def functionality that works across repository boundaries and across entire code bases. Their role at GopherCon 2019 is to live blog all of the talks for interested parties who were not able to physically attend the conference.

Liz Rice is a technology evangelist with Aqua Security. It's a container security company, and she came to GopherCon to teach a workshop that introduced people to the concepts behind containers. She also recently became a Google developer expert in Go, which certifies her as someone creating interesting content that the community can look towards for education and inspiration.

Johnny Boursiquot is an SRE at Heroku, and a long time gopher. He gave the closing keynote at GopherCon, and his singular focus is on ensuring that the Go community is truly diverse and welcoming to new members. Every year, new developers attend GopherCon, and he wants to encourage veterans to embrace this growth as a positive change. He also provides a wealth of resources on listeners who are brand new to Go and eager to learn more about it.

• Athens Project is a proxy server for the Go modules download API
• Several resources for newcomers to Go include:
  • A Tour of Go
  • Go by Example
  • Go Bridge workshops
• Aaron Schlesinger's talk, "The Athens Project"
• Johnny Boursiquot's closing keynote, "What Got Us Here, Won't Get Us There"

Chris Castle recently attended GopherCon 2019 in San Diego, and captured small conversations from many different Go community members. In Part One of a two-part episode, he had several conversations with GopherCon speakers about what they were building.

Nick Gerakines is the Director of Software Engineering at Mattel, the toy company. Mattel has several toys with Internet connectivity, and Go is the primary language used for all of their connected products, whether it's to support authentication and parental controls, or providing product catalog and product instance information. A lot of core gameplay mechanics, such as the number of "miles" a car has ridden on a track, are also transmitted and reported through Go services.

Robert Ross works at FireHydrant. They're using Go for their Kubernetes integration and internal developer tools for local development. For example, they are able to build Docker Compose files on the fly. His favorite aspect about the language is that it can build a portable (and performant!) binary with very few lines of code.

Jessica Lucci is an infrastructure engineer at GitHub. Her interest in Go is catered towards establishing some standardizations beyond simple code formatting. For example, with the recent introduction of Go modules, devising a system around versioning third-party libraries is an interesting problem, particularly when it comes to pinning versions for consistency or updating versions in the event of a CVE.

Tim Raymond works for Gopher Guides, and conducted a training session on testing your Go code. His favorite aspect of GopherCon is its community, where new and old friends meet to share their interests.

Jay McGavren is the author of Head First Go, a programming book designed to teach programmers about how to be effective with Go. It will take Go beginners from basic language features all the way to coding a simple web app.

Carolyn Van Slyck works for Microsoft, and she's used Go to design her perfect CLI. By focusing on the developer experience, she was not only able to abstract away some of the harder tasks which a user might rely upon piping several commands together into one, but she also isolated some of the CLI-specific aspects, such as argument parsing, for future developers to feel more confident when contributing to the project.

• The Mattel Hot Wheels id toy is powered by Go services
• Modules are a newer system of dependency management for Go
• Head First Go is a programming tutorial for Go, written by Jay McGavren and published by O'Reilly Media
• Gopher Guides leads Go workshops for interested individuals
• Jessica Lucci's talk, "You Can't Go Your Own Way"
• Tim Raymond's lightning talk, "Parsing Expression Grammar"
• Jay McGavren's talk, "Teaching Tech", on effectively teaching programming
• Carolyn Van Slyck's talk, "Design Command-Line Tools People Love"

Joe Kutner, an engineer at Heroku, leads the discussion on Cloud Native Buildpacks with Stephen Levine (engineer at Pivotal), Emily Casey (engineer at Pivotal), Ben Hale (steward of the Java Buildpack), and Terence Lee (engineer at Heroku). All of them are involved in overseeing the CNB project, and have used the technology in production at their companies. At its core, CNBs are an OCI-compliant alternative to Dockerfiles, except the container is built without very much developer interaction. By analyzing source code, CNB is able to determine the base image to start from, as well as which steps to undertake in order to ensure that an application runs correctly. It's a similar logical process to the way in which Heroku's regular buildpacks operate: one Git push command is all that Heroku needs to generate a slug of your application, including fetching any dependencies or managing assets.

A Buildpack provides you with consistency by keeping your dependencies and base image up-to-date to the latest standards. It also doesn't require the average application developer to also be an expert on everything. Rather than needing to understand all of the Unix-y commands necessary to compose an application, or knowing when a particular component has a CVE, a developer's chief concern concern is to continue building their app as usual, and CNB will handle all of the other components necessary to make a deployable container.

The aim for CNBs was to make development easier for individual developers, as well as those at large enterprises. Terrance and Ben in particular know that the value of the buildpacks come from five years of production experience. Regular applications have benefitted from buildpacks, and the ecosystem around those had grown to the point where they could take what they'd learned and apply them to container images as well.

The episode concludes with a look towards the future of CNBs. As all of the APIs and tooling are open source, groups can also design CNBs for any language and framework they wish to containerize. The project recently entered beta, and, despite the positive reaction, there are still some changes that need to be made with regards to how changes to buildpacks are applied. There are processes for community members to be involved, and multiple forums for communicating with the CNB leadership team.

• Buildpacks.io is where you can go to learn more about Cloud Native Buildpacks
• Discussion for proposals to CNB happens on GitHub on GitHub
• There's a Slack workspace where developers and users congregate

As part of its product suite to automate a business' needs, Salesforce offers a Live Agent product, whose central component is a chatbot that can respond to a user's inquiries on the web or other messaging platforms, such as Facebook or SMS. A key design requirement of the chatbot is to be able to simulate human interaction by responding quickly. For an engineering team of eight, that means being able to offload as much operational responsibility as possible to Heroku's platform.

Salesforce's customers exist around the world, from Europe to Asia to the Americas. Heroku provide multiregional offerings for its dynos and databases that don't require too much administration or configuration. The benefits of not needing to define roles or specifications further simplifies the chatbot team's own architectural decision to design it as a collection of microservices.

Furthermore, the chatbot team uses Terraform to define the infrastructure requirements of their application. By predefining the necessary add-ons, data services, and private spaces for every application, they are able to quickly spin up new external services whenever necessary.

• Salesforce's Live Chat is powered by chatbots to reply to users' issues in real-time.
• Heroku buildpacks are open source packages which turn an application's source code into an executable slug. The Salesforce chatbot team built their own customized buildpacks to support their unique needs.
• Terraform offers a provider that integrates with Heroku

Cory Haber is the VP of Technology for Furnished Quarters, a global corporate housing company. But he's also an educated painter. He's interviewed by Erin Allard, a Platform Support Engineer at Heroku, to delve into the effect technology has had on art, and vice versa. For Cory, art is about the intent of the artist; it's a moot point to ask whether anything a computer produces can be considered art. In the end, a human has trained an AI or written the software, and the computer becomes a tool, similar to a camera or a pen.

Engaging in artist practices allows Cory to take a break from the purely logical examinations which programming requires of him. To some, it may be seen as procrastination, but he believes that the best way to solve a problem is to allow your mind to wander of. That's what his current painting practices allows him to do. At the same time, he also follows along on the generative art movement, which takes place primarily on Twitter. There, artists and programmers share their programs that generate art that can be represented on screens or canvases.

The history of generative art goes back to the 60s. For individuals curious to learn more about this practice, he recommends the Processing programming language. Similar to a Jupyter notebook, it's a part-framework, part-application hybrid that works in generating visual arts. He also encourages individuals with no artistic background to just start taking classes on painting or music. No one knows everything about programming when they first start; they learn the skill and become better at it the more time they invest. Art is created under a similar focus.

Cory has compiled a list of resources with more information on the intersection of technology and art:

• Vera Molnar
• Lillian Schwartz
• Ken Knowlton
• Frieder Nake
• Georg Nees
• Michael Noll

• Tyler Hobbs
• Paul Rickards
• Benjamin Kovach
• Anders Hoff
• Matt Deslauriers
• Manuel Gamboa Naon
• Casey Reas (Co-Founder of Processing)
• John Maeda
• Jared Tarbell

• Robbie Barrat
• Mario Klingemann

• Processing
• openFrameworks

• Art Nome
• The Coding Train
• Daniel Shiffman
• Books on Generative Art
• Manohar Vanga

• Piet Mondrian
• Sol Lewitt
• Hilma af Klint
• Kasimir Malevich
• Wassily Kandinsky
• Joseph Albers

Trey starts the conversation with Shirley by noting the difference between being a manager and being a leader. Managers are a framework for discussing pay, onboarding and offboarding, HR interactions, and so forth. Leadership is about inspiring others to unite together to work behind a purpose. Any IC, for example, can be a leader for just a handful of his teammates. Being a good leader means knowing what's important, conveying that to someone else, and executing on it.

To do that, Trey emphasizes that a foundation of psychological safety is essential. Allowing people to speak up when they disagree with an issue, or admitting your faults when you've made a mistake, is an incredible method of breaking down barriers between people and fostering a culture of truth. Fostering individual growth is also a good strategy, as people generally want to continue improving, whether it's learning a new programming language or a new technical system they're curious about. Removing obstacles to people achieving their goals is key as a leader.

Shirley notes that the role of a leader requires an immense amount of mental and emotional energy, as your concerns are not just your own, but also those of the people who rely on you. Trey responds by emphasizing health as an important priority that's often neglected. Individuals will take better care of their pets than themselves. By demonstrating that he is not infallible, by taking vacations, encouraging exercise, or ensuring enough hours of sleep, his team in response understands that taking breaks is a good decision, not a dangerous one.

Finally, communication is always necessary. If there are too many distractions that prevent you from accomplishing an objective, you should tell your team you'll need some quiet time, rather than silently disappear. If you're concerned about a path a company is embarking on, you should tell a leader you feel comfortable talking with. Communication breeds trust, and that's the foundation of any successful relationship.

Trey recommends several books on effective leadership:

• "Chasing excellence"
• "The Score will Take Care of Itself"
• "Extreme Ownership"
• "Dichotomy of Leadership"
• "Drive"
• "How to Win Friends"
• "Crucial Conversations
• "Slack"

Design is at the very core of Heroku, influencing every aspect of the brand and the platform.

Join Vikram Rana, product marketing and developer advocacy lead at Heroku, as he chats with Heroku’s head of brand design and front-end developer Charlie Gleason on his role—covering his history and background, what it’s like to work at Heroku, and how he handles being a custodian for a brand he loves.

From tooling, to teamwork, to the ethos of the brand itself, Charlie and Vik dig into what makes good design (and more importantly) what makes design good. They cover topics like ethics, empathy, humility, education, and bringing your authentic self to work.

(Also, one correction—The Cut is based in Perth, not Melbourne. Sorry, Scott.)

• Charlie Gleason
• Goodfilms
• Unbound
• The Cut (which is based in Perth, not Melbourne)
• Heroku Brand
• Heroku Design
• Alasdair Monk’s GitHub
• Whimsical
• Figma
• Sketch
• Web Assembly / WASM
• Adobe Creative Suite
• Tailwind CSS
• Refactoring UI
• Airbnb design
• Glitch
• Offscreen Magazine
• Kai Brach