Code[ish]

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

Getaway is a startup that offers short-term rentals. They specialize in ensuring that the domiciles they offer are far outside city limits and often inaccessible to Internet and cellular connectivity.

Zach Feldman, their VP of Technology, chats with Jason Salaz, a member of the Heroku Support Team, about the unique challenges this requirement imposes. For example, rather than providing a physical key, guests can unlock their cabin door's smart lock with a unique pin code. In order to support their efforts to scale, a custom API was built to ensure that pin codes are registered and deactivated for every check-in and check-out.

Cabins are also equipped with other IoT automation devices, such as leak sensors, which report back to Getaway House if pipes are leaking. Both of these technologies were designed to work on the low latency connections that the cabins are equipped with.

Relying on SMS is another way that the team is able to provide service, as those networks predate much of the current infrastructure that smartphones have come to rely on. Building correct and functional software is difficult, but Zach notes that there's an even greater challenge in scaling fault-tolerant systems in the woods.

• Getaway is the service featured in this episode
• POTS lines are still in service to provide telephone service in remote locations

Heroku Front-end Engineer Jamie White sits down with René Winkelmeyer, a developer evangelist at Salesforce, to talk about the company's commitment to advancing web components. Web components are a collection of standardized web and browser APIs designed to overcome some of the limitations with the design of the Internet, particularly when it comes to page rendering. Web components exist outside of web frameworks such as React, Ember, or Vue in that they are built using standard web technologies and can be used in any application, regardless of the framework or language it's architected in. They're built for reusability and consistency across your application's UI.

Lightning Web Components is a toolkit built and open sourced by Salesforce to ease the development of web components. These components are Enterprise-level, in that they provide functionality for many complicated UI scenarios. Although there are other web component frameworks, such as LitElement, a core goal of LWC is to make the process of building web components more declarative.

The conversation turns towards attracted Salesforce to investing time in web components, with the conclusion being that open standards would continue to succeed in the future when compared against closed and proprietary tools. Their focus is also on ensuring that accessibility needs are met for every user of a website.

• The Lighting Web Components site has more information on LWCs, including documentation and a demo application.
• The LWC GitHub repo is where all of the community conversations occur.
• LitElement is one alternative web component framework
• You can follow René on Twitter @muenzpraeger

The web started off weird, and there's a wonderful and concerted effort to ensure that, at least parts of it, stay that way.

Heroku designer Charlie Gleason and lead strategist Stephen Barlow dive into their experiences working on side projects—small, silly, funny, and emotive vignettes on the web—that span random Arrested Development episode selectors, Kanye West browser-based mini games, collaborative art projects, and everything in between.

Learn how to get involved with your own community of makers, why it's more important to have fun than it is to try and get internet famous, and some things to look out for when working with others.

So, put away the kanban board, get inspired, and keep the internet weird with a side project of your own.

• Charlie's music video, Tweetflight
• Stephen's Kanye Zone
• Stephen's community, Botnik
• Indie game company, Blyts
• Matt Desl (canvas-sketch)
• Jenn Schiffer
• Glitch
• Tim Holman

Chris Castle continues his conversation with Claire Lee, the head of the early stage group at Silicon Valley Bank. In this half, Claire begins by providing hard data that indicates companies which are founded by individuals from diverse backgrounds are wildly profitable. She goes on to say that conversely, the members in the top VCs firms are of a disproportionate make-up. She concludes that in order for more funds and ancillary services to be available to start-up founders, the individuals distributing the capital also needs to change, in order to give everyone a fair shot at success.

Claire goes on to point out that in addition to money, mentorship is a valuable (and limited) resource in Silicon Valley. A good partnership with a VC includes them granting access to advisors, potential board members, and potential customers. Her passion extends beyond just funding good ideas; it's about making connections between people and helping them to grow.

The episode concludes with advice and encouragement for anyone interested in founding a start-up. If you feel that you can solve a problem in ways that no one else has before, that passion will manifest itself into an opportunity in one way or another, whether that's within a start-up accelerator or in a digital community. Surround yourself with people who believe in you.

Several resources for founders just getting started with their idea were mentioned on this episode:

• Startup Grind
• Tech Stars
• Endeavor Global

For legal assistance, the following firms were offered:

• Cooley
• WilmerHale

For staffing, Atrium was one option which Claire named.

Chris Castle sits down with Claire Lee, the head of the early stage group at Silicon Valley Bank. Claire discusses the various startups she is involved with across various sectors, such as cleantech, fintech, and healthcare. Much of the conversation revolves around her experience at Recode's Code Conference 2019 and three lessons she took away from her attendance.

First, media platform companies such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter need to make large changes to become more transparent. Their user base is losing trust due to the persistent problems of hostile environments, hate speech, and misinformation.

The second takeaway was on the role of technology throughout our lives. For example, automated content moderation through AI can only go so far, as the technology behind them require a certain baseline standard of ethics which is as yet to be defined. A generation of new users are looking for tooling to place constraints on bad actors, which are problems that have not been tackled at scale.

Finally, Claire's third realization was the adaptation of technology in decidedly non-startup environs. For example, she cites how both Harley Davidson and Goldman Sachs are revolutionizing their businesses to adapt to both new consumer needs and to attract engineering talent. Both consumers and employees are demanding better corporate values before acquiring or working for a brand.

• Recode's Code Conference is the world's premier technology conference.
• Steven Sinofsky's blog post summarizing CodeCon 2019.