Code[ish]

Dr. Mireille Reece is a practicing clinical psychologist and, along with Adam Stacoviak, editor-in-chief of the Changelog, they run Brain Science, a podcast exploring behavior change and mental health. Chris Castle, a Developer Advocate at Heroku, is interviewing them to find out more about the stigma associated with mental health. There's an acknowledgement that while everyone at one point or another struggles with their mental health--be it through anxiety, depression, isolation, or stress--we, as a society, tend to be hesitant to discuss our struggles publicly. Dr. Reece posits that people view this as a weakness, one they're not willing to admit. There's a fear that if you reveal this part of yourself, you'll be rejected.

Chris points out that mental health is not like physical health: if you break a finger, you can go to a doctor and get a splint. But if you have some mental anguish, it feels like your very identity is hurting, and Dr. Reece concurs that there's no "quick fix" to the problem. The first step, however, is to differentiate that how you hurt is not equivalent to who you are. You have to admit that you don't have the tools or skills to resolve the problem on your own, which will inevitably lead you to wanting to find a solution in a therapist.

The dialog concludes with a recognition that there are many different types of therapy available, and it can be overwhelming to identify the one that works for you. The important thing to do is to find someone you can trust, and have a conversation with, because you'll be more willing to act on their advice. This might also mean seeing multiple therapists before discovering one that "fits." Adam posits that it can be helpful to imagine a future version of yourself as an end goal, from which you can begin to work towards through changing your habits and behaviors.

• Brain Science is a podcast exploring the human brain to understand behavior change, habit formation & mental health

Greg Nokes, Master Technical Architect at Heroku, is joined by Alex Broussard, the CTO of THINKMD. THINKMD is a technology company that's working to build next-generation clinical logic. The primary aim is to put healthcare tools in the hands of anyone, anywhere, but especially in places where healthcare access is limited. As Alex points out, the obvious challenge in such a platform is to optimize the application to work in low bandwidth settings. To work around this limitation, THINKMD designed their platform as a progressive web application, ensuring that, not matter what, it function as an "offline first" app. Data is collected and stored locally, and transmissions between the client and the server occur when Internet connectivity is restored.

In addition to networking challenges, the functionality and the visual design of the app also has strict hardware limitations. The mobile devices running THINKMD are not smartphones, but rather older feature phones which lack touchscreens and keyboards. However, they're still very durable, with incredible battery life, and operate better under remote conditions. These phones run an operating system called KaiOS, which allows developers to build networked apps that run in Chrome browser environment. As well, THINKMD was founded by two doctors, which requires every update to the app to pass very rigorous clinical standards. Information that's presented cannot just have a good UX: it must also be accurate, as it's literally dealing with life or death situations.

THINKMD's frontend runs on Vue.js. This choice was partially made because of Vuetify, which provides localization support, a component that's key to the app as it's used in over a dozen languages. By trusting how Vue and Vuetify support the look-and-feel of the app, Alex and his team can focus more on the backend data retrieval and delivery, including setting up duplicate servers across Asia and Africa to address latencies. For other teams who are building a multi-regional app targeted at low latency countries, Alex strongly suggests that you consider optimization techniques in advance of feature development.

• THINKMD's mission is to eliminate preventable deaths by increasing healthcare access via new and disruptive technologies
• KaiOS brings smartphone functionality to affordable devices

Greg Nokes is a Master Technical Architect at Heroku, and he's interviewing a returning guest, Ryan Townsend, the CTO of SHIFT Commerce. SHIFT Commerce is an e-commerce PaaS that provides an online space for businesses to host their websites and sell their goods. Their customers aren't exclusively virtual; some of them have brick-and-mortar shops which have had to shut down due to COIVD. As the volume of online ordering increased, some of these businesses noticed that their distribution centers couldn't keep up with the orders. This was due both to pent up demand as well as social distancing guidelines slowing the pace of operations.

Working with these retailers, SHIFT Commerce came up with a rather simple solution: when an online order was placed, the platform would check to see whether a store closer to the customer already had the item they bought. If it did, then the customer would get their item shipped locally, rather than from the distribution center. This had several benefits: it saved the business money; it reduce emissions from vehicles driving all around the country; and it preserved the retail employees' jobs, as their tasks shifted from ringing up customers to selecting and packing shipments.

Implementing the technical algorithm to perform this logic took just about a week; after that proof of concept, it took another four to six weeks to build a full fledged microservices that's completely API driven. The components used to design this were technologies that SHIFT Commerce had already invested in: Postgres, Redis, Apache Kafka, and so on. Ryan suggests that software companies always be prepared for unexpected changes, such as a new competitor entering the market. Having the flexibility to make decisions with agility helped SHIFT Commerce pivot and respond quickly to external changes, such as COVID.

• SHIFT Commerce delivers scalable e-commerce solutions
• Learn more about SHIFT Commerce in the Application Performance and Building SaaS on PaaS episode

Greg Nokes, Master Technical Architect at Heroku, is joined by Meg McLaughlin, THINKMD's Director of Research and Implementation. THINKMD is a technology company that's working to build next-generation clinical logic. The primary aim is to put healthcare tools in the hands of anyone, anywhere, but especially in places where healthcare access is limited. The platform starts by guiding a user to provide some initial data about who they are. It then goes on to take the medical history of the person being assessed. By comparing a person's history, symptoms, and habits against the result of broader community data, THINKMD analyzes and visualizes that data to present information like the overall population and individual health.

Using a system called syndromic surveillance, THINKMD can look at incoming data to assess epidemics, such as malaria or COVID. By looking at trends of data over time, such as people's temperatures, syndromic surveillance can help identify potential cases and clusters, ultimately assisting health systems to manage where to allocate testing, equipment, or treatments. THINKMD is operating in over 13 countries--primarily in Africa and Southeast Asia--requiring the platform to target a variety of languages and cultures.

Tracking data is just one part of THINKMD's mission; the other portion is providing education and support for their on-site partners. Establishing campaigns to distribute vaccines and educating the populace on sanitary practices are just some of the challenges they face. They solve these problems by working closely to transfer knowledge to individuals who the community trusts.

• THINKMD's mission is to eliminate preventable deaths by increasing healthcare access via new and disruptive technologies

Corey Martin is a Customer Solutions Architect at Heroku. He's interviewing Brandon Stewart, the founder and project lead of GNAR, and Yuri Oliveira, one of its software engineers. GNAR is a software consultancy, and one of their projects involves building an Internet of Things solution for RMS, a freight transportation company. Internet of Things is a broad term used to describe any object that can connect to the Internet or communicate with other devices; popular examples include the Next Thermostat or Amazon Alexa.

For RMS, Brandon and Yuri built a system to monitor trucks transporting shipping containers. Without an IoT infrastructure, truck drivers would communicate with their managers via radio signal, to get a sense of the optimal routes to take or the next task to focus on. With GNAR's IoT setup, the trucks communicate with their home base wirelessly, and there's no ambiguity over what to prioritize. Managers can also take a look at monthly data to track productivity, as well as individual drivers' performance. This gives them insights into both broad analytics and live behavior.

The team at GNAR uses Heroku Postgres, Heroku Data for Redis, and Apache Kafka on Heroku to ingest, process, and store data. Placing their faith in Heroku's products lets them concentrate on building the unique aspects of their business, while offloading the DevOps responsibilities. For both Yuri and Brandon, the delight in working with IoT comes from using their abstract software development skills to affect changes in "the real world." Having that physical impact on a business' operations has been incredible to watch. Brandon believes that there are many industries that could benefit from incorporating IoT. He suggests that people interested in the space investigate industries, ask people questions, and see where opportunities can be found.

• GNAR is a software consultancy
• Learn more about how GNAR uses Heroku
• Discover how to run Apache Kafka on Heroku

Jason Salaz is a member of the Heroku support team, and he's leading a conversation with Daniel Klein, a software engineer at Landing. Landing is a network of pre-furnished apartments that provides its users with a lease-free place to live for as many months as they need to. As remote work has becoming increasing necessary, the people who use Landing are able to live in any city they feel like across America. Aside from a monthly rent and annual membership, there are no other fees. In addition to furniture, the apartments have kitchen and bathroom basics, and maintenance is taken care of 24/7.

Obviously, Landing has been affected by COVID and the lockdowns, which has limited people's ability to travel. With restrictions slowly easing, they've been seeing growth returning. In particular, Daniel's noted that retirees make up the most surprising portion of their customer base. Older individuals with no job and the freedom to travel can visit cities which they've always dreamed of seeing.

• Landing is a network of fully furnished apartments in cities all across the country

Becky Jaimes is a Product Manager at Salesforce, and she's interviewing Nick Frandsen, a co-founder of Dovetail. Dovetail is a company that helps startups grow into ambitious technology companies. They do this by providing an independent team of designers and programmers that will help the startup with growth hacking and marketing. The goal is to help them build their company and scale it into something much larger than where they currently are. In exchange, they take a piece of equity in the company, resulting in a longterm partnership. Employees at Dovetail both have a salary and a stake in each of the companies they work with.

When it comes to working with clients, there are a set of factors Nick and his team relies on. First and foremost, they only work with startups that already have funding and a strong founding team. Leaders with a large domain expertise provides Dovetail with confidence that VCs have done their share of research in believing in a startup's future success. At the beginning of the relationship, they'll work directly with founders, and even work on hiring world class talent to achieve their goals. They'll set milestones together and Dovetail will step up to do the work wherever the startup might lack the experience or people power to complete them. Startups typically witness the benefit of the Dovetail relationship as more user engagement accrues, which helps to establish a longer term relationship.

Yeah, we, we get quite a few. I mean, we have an investing framework where we sort of look for a range of different factors. I mean, some of them are the same things that I guess a lot of VCs are looking for. We're looking for a really strong founding team, people that have succeeded in the past, people that have been able to do a lot of interesting successful things in their past, and generally people that have sort of a lot of expertise in a certain area. One of the things that we really like is people that have a huge amount of domain expertise in something. We actually often like things that are not purely software, so something where there's either difficult barriers to entry or another thing that we like is sometimes we get founders coming to us with relatively obscure industries that we don't really know much about initially, but then we start looking into the industry and it turns out that it's enormous and that there are not tons of really modern companies operating in that industry.

One of the things that I think is really important and actually often kind of under appreciated in our industry is just the importance of sales and marketing, especially in startups. The technology is really important, there's no doubt about it, but we see a lot of young companies that are strong in the technology side, but they really haven't put as much effort into how they're going to sell this product, how they're going to market it. It's kind of been an after thought. It's page seven of the pitch deck, but really without sales and marketing, you're not going to build the traction that you need. You're not going to get enough customers to get the feedback from them to raise further investment. I mean, in some ways, it's kind of annoying. I wish you could just build an awesome product and go from there. But that sales and marketing really is hugely important.

Most of the companies in Dovetail's client list are FinTechs based out of Australia, but they have recently expanded to the U.S. Dovetail's business results eventually become aligned with the performance of the companies they work with, which positions them less as an agency. Their model requires a lot of discipline and investment, not just financially, but also strategically: both halves are continuously improving along the journey towards bigger growth.

• Dovetail is a full-service product development studio specializing in building digital products that scale

Charlie Gleason is a designer and frontend developer at Heroku and Salesforce. He's invited Ben Vinegar, an experienced frontend developer and now manager at Sentry, to share his opinions on what frontend development means today. Way back in 2010, Ben understood that JavaScript, which wasn't taken all that seriously, had the potential to take a more significant part of the web development experience. At the time, Firebug had just been introduced, exposing developers to a debugging experience in the browser. From there, more JavaScript tools and frameworks began to proliferate. Just as Rails popularized the idea of an MVC, so too did Backbone, as well as introduce the concept of single page apps, leading to Angular, Ember, and eventually, React.

For many people involved in (and observing) the JavaScript community, the pace of change induced a certain amount of uncertainty as to which framework developers should be learning. Ben empathizes with this frustration, but cautions that software development really hasn't changed in the last twenty years. Every time a brand new language or tool comes out that promises to revolutionize the industry, it's better to wait it out a year before even considering putting it into production. Better still, take a step back and ask how this new tool will make your app better for your users. When you approach software development as a way to solve people's problems, you become more pragmatic in your choices, and can work to solve real problems, rather than overoptimize or get distracted.

Ben concludes by observing how designers have become much more technical over the last few years, with tools like Abstract introducing the concept of branches to design files, or the relationship between Figma and Sketch to actual code. Teams are no longer making mock-ups and handing them over to "real programmers" but actually building the components themselves, in reusable and shareable ways. Ultimately, he sees programming drifting more towards the full stack approach: in order to be able to build a good product, you need to understand how to implement features on a server, design it in a user friendly way, and apply JavaScript effectively to communicate with the backend and the browser.

Greg Nokes worked at Heroku right after it was acquired by Salesforce in December of 2010. He's joined in conversation by Chris De Gour, a Master Technical Architect at Salesforce, who has been working there since the acquisition. It's hard to imagine now, but when Salesforce and Heroku were both starting out, each company was introducing a radically different paradigm in how developers thought about their work. For Salesforce, it was about encouraging enterprise developers to embrace the Internet, and not need to worry about managing complex data schemes. For Heroku, they sought to make it as easy as possible to deploy applications, abstracting away the infrastructure and operations requirements. Salesforce was interested in Heroku precisely because they shared the same belief: that developers should concentrate on writing software, and leave the lower tier concerns to someone else.

Now, the conversation has shifted. Companies who use Salesforce might not know how Heroku can help them. They've accumulated all of this data, about their customers or their business, and Heroku can provide them with an easy way to gain insights about that data. Perhaps they want to set up a workflow to pass sensitive information to other people. Salesforce can provide an SSO login system, sharing rules for the data, and other business logic; a simple app built in any mainstream language can run on Heroku to ingest that data.

Greg and Chris both understand how levels of abstraction that cloud services provide can be perceived as "dangerous" models in several ways. By offloading concerns to other platforms, developers sometimes feel like they're not "really" developing; worse, they might believe that if they're not in total control of every aspect of the application, they'll eventually run into shortcomings. These fears are valid, but the industry as a whole has been embracing cloud services more and more as organizations realize that they can be most efficient when they focus on what matters to their core business.

• Trailhead is an online platform offering a variety of developer curriculums

Eric Chen is an engineer on Heroku's Ecosystem team. With him are Justin Abrams and Michael Rispoli, who run Cause of a Kind. Cause of a Kind helps organizations with their SEO; Justin engages with the brands on a marketing level, and Michael looks after their frontend development. The goal for SEO has evolved beyond just having the right metadata appear in search results. It's also about understanding how to make better business decisions, both through marketing strategies as well as organizational and technical planning to create products that serves consumer's needs.

From the Internet's beginnings, SEO has been about helping search bots crawl sites through keywords. The thinking went that the better your metadata, the more likely your website was going to appear higher in search results. But these days, SEO is more about how users navigate sites. Justin and Michael explain how if you create a site with a user's experience in mind, the search bots and algorithms will rank you more favorably. You can use proper semantic HTML, provide accessibility through labels and aria tags, or define consistent URL routes; but you can also minimize frontend JavaScript dependencies to ensure that your page loads quickly.

Organizations are investing more in frontend experiences more than ever before, from SPAs to even providing virtual and augmented reality experiences. Michael believes that developing sites with an SEO-first mindset almost inherently leads to a better product, because your performance and accessibility improvements will be noticeable to your users, even if you're trying to get better search ranks. In the end, both marketing needs--getting people to visit your site--and frontend development concerns--making sure people can use your site--are no longer two distinct issues.

• Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages
• Cause of a Kind provides web marketing services to organizations
• Smashing Magazine and A List Apart are only magazines on frontend development
• BrightEdge gives marketers real-time research, recommendations, and rankings