Code[ish]

Charlie Gleason, a designer and developer at Heroku, is in conversation with Ben Harding, a developer at Raygun. Their conversation centers around a website's "critical render path," which are the steps in which HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are converted into pixels which a user actually interacts with in their browser. The fast these pixels are rendered, the better the experience which a user receives. Delays in website rendering can lead to an impact on one's business, as users are likely to leave slow sites; more often, it's an issue of accessibility, where users with slower connections should be able to visit any page they want to.

Ben outlines four metrics that can be key to gathering information about how your website is performing. There's "time to first paint," which is the time it takes for a browser to render anything; there's "time to first contentful paint," which is the time it takes for the browser to render any content, like an image or text; there's load time, which is the time it takes for all of your assets--CSS, JavaScript, and fonts--to download; and there's "time to interactive," which is when a user can start engaging with a website, such as by clicking buttons or filling out a form. It's important to measure all of these stats first so that you can approach performance optimizations from a baseline of where you are, and where you want to be.

There's plenty of low-hanging fruit when it comes to improving website rendering performance. You could try minifying and compressing your CSS, JavaScript, and images, so that the user's browser doesn't need to fetch large files. You can also implement techniques such as code splitting, which ensures that CSS and JavaScript is only loaded for the pages those styles or functions are needed on, rather than every single page on your site. You can load your assets asynchronously, so that the browser is not blocked on any one task. The important thing is to take a look at your starting metrics, and focus on tackling one of your problems until the load times are down to an acceptable range.

Fine-tuning website performance is an iterative cycle: as more features are added, performance will degrade. Sometimes you can't optimize a website any further than you've already done, and that's okay. As long as you keep your user's perceived performance in mind, you can still get away with having spinners and splash screens, so long as they are receiving feedback and are aware that something is happening.

• Critical rendering path
• DOM and CSSOM
• Lighthouse
• Webpack
• Parcel
• Uglify
• ImageOptim
• TinyPNG
• SVGO
• Media attributes for CSS files
• Async / defer for JavaScript
• Preloading / prefetching assets
• Heroku'sMalibu icon library
• SVG and sprite sheets
• Code splitting
• React Lazy and Suspense
• Visualising bundle sizes
• Tree shaking
• Raygun

Corey Martin, a customer solutions architect at Heroku, is in conversation with Jason Meller, the founder and CEO of Kolide, to talk about the future of enterprise security software. Kolide is a device monitoring software with an emphasis on its users. By and large, devices which are part of the Kolide fleet are free to operate unrestricted, whether that's downloading files or disabling firewalls. However, Kolide lets users know when they're engaging in potentially insecure behaviors, through Slack messages and OS notifications. It places the responsibility and trust for safety onto the user, rather than locking everything down.

Jason came up with the idea for Kolide after working at GE. As an enormous enterprise company, GE had to ensure that its employees' devices were always secure, to prevent outside threats from infiltrating their network. While realizing the importance of keeping users safe, he disliked the invasiveness of existing tools, not to mention that their approaches hindered necessary applications and services employees used to be successful at their jobs.

User focused security, which is what Kolide practices, starts with empathy. This comes about by visualizing the needs of people that are using the devices every day and trying to understand where risks might exist there, from the entire chain of users.

• Kolide is an infrastructure analytics company
• Osquery allows you to query your OS using an SQL syntax

Corey Martin, a customer solutions architect at Heroku, is joined in conversation with Bryan Woods, the CTO of a platform called Rhino. Rhino is a simple CRUD app with an enormous responsibility. Typically, individuals need to pay thousands of dollars upfront when renting an apartment, to cover any damages and liabilities. Instead, Rhino charges renters--98% of whom are responsible and get their deposits back--a small monthly fee, and sends those payments directly to property holders. Landlords are protected and renters save money.

Although the idea is easy to understand, the effort to launch the product required working with established regulations. One of the co-founders also had to license themselves as an agent who can sell insurance, just to be able to operate within city and state laws. Yet unlike many other startups, Bryan sees regulation as something to embrace, not skirt. By working with regulators, Rhino has been able to establish the rules for how they operate, as well as nearly guarantee a competitive advantage by being the only company operating in the insurance space in this way.

As with many other startups, relying on established frameworks like Rails and stable platforms like Heroku have enabled Bryan and his team to focus on building a great product, not worry about implementation or uptime. Bryan also encourages other entrepreneurs working in heavily regulated spaces to trust in themselves and continue pushing through existing red tape. Rather than building something cheap and fast, truly revolutionary ideas will take time to convince others--particularly if legal requirements are already in place--but once you prove the idea you can become a leader in the field.

• Rhino replaces up-front security deposits with a small monthly payment

Erin Allard, a Platform Support Engineer at Heroku, interviews Philippe Vanderstigel, who has launched several start-ups, most recently, RocketChart. RocketChart is a cash flow management and forecast software solution for businesses, and while it's been a success, it wasn't Philippe's first attempt. He's built products that managed online gaming subscriptions to selling sausages online. Some of these ideas worked, and others didn't. Undeterred, Philippe mocked up an image of what he envisioned a budgeting app to look like, and within twenty-four hours had hundreds of people expressing interest in an app that didn't exist.

Philippe talks about the difficulties involved starting any business, namely raising funds and validating your ideas. Philippe very strongly believes that founders need to be directly engaged with their customers, especially in the early stages of the business. He personally responds to every message he receives, and asks direct questions to his users about what features they would like to see before his team spends time building them out.

Of particular importance to Philippe is managing the expectations of his users. He is the only one working full-time on RocketChart; the other two employees, his friend Elie and brother Marc, have day jobs to pay their bills. What this results in is a very calculated and gradual acceptance of new users, which also receive direct one-on-one correspondence with Philippe. This also makes it easier to divide the workload, so that the three of them can continue building a sustainable business without taking outside funding.

• Philippe's post detailing how he validated a SaaS idea in one day to 150 beta signups
• Philippe's LinkedIn

Blaine Kaho`onei is an Alliances Director for Heroku; he also sits on the board for Purple Mai`a, an online learning platform bringing technology skillsets to the native Hawaiian community. He's joined in conversation by David Pickett, a software developer and lead instructor with Purple Mai`a, as well as Jennifer Hooper, Heroku's Technical Product Marketing, Content, and Brand Director, who has also volunteered at Purple Mai`a. Blaine begins the dialog by talking about his interest in bringing together Hawaii's rich history of innovation and technological development with its indigenous culture. There aren't many economic opportunities for native families in Hawaii, nor are they programs designed to provide the youth with a valuable technical skill set. Most people with coding or design skills have felt the need to move away, furthering splintering the Hawaiian community. Blaine and David are keen to establish a tech hub in Hawaii.

Blaine Kaho`onei is an Alliances Director for Heroku; he also sits on the board for Purple Mai`a, an educational non-profit, whose mission is to educate and inspire the native Hawaiian community through cultural, social and enterprise technologies. He's joined in conversation by David Pickett, a software developer and lead instructor with Purple Mai`a, as well as Jennifer Hooper, Heroku's Technical Product Marketing, Content, and Brand Director, who has also volunteered at Purple Mai`a. Blaine begins the dialog by talking about his interest in bringing together Hawaii's rich history of innovation and technological development with its indigenous culture. There aren't many economic opportunities for native families in Hawaii, nor are they programs designed to provide the youth with a valuable technical skill set. Most people with coding or design skills have felt the need to move away, furthering splintering the Hawaiian community. Blaine and David are keen to grow the tech hub in Hawaii.

To accomplish that mission, Purple Mai`a's main focus is on middle school-aged students in classrooms. Volunteers and staff teach students on a range of topics, from coding and computer science fundamentals to user experience design and graphics design. In order to work towards assisting as many students as possible, David saw the need for incorporating a learning management system. Unable to find one that was centered on the student, they built their own platform called Haumana in 2017. They wanted it to be a tool for students to learn through what they're motivated about. This platform was in-use for in-person classes and is now being used for remote-only classes. Jennifer became involved in the program by volunteering her time answering questions on what a career in tech looks like. She also provides feedback on students' projects, and teaches them ways outside of the classroom to work on themselves, such as maintaining a LinkedIn profile. She has also provided insights into how Haumana can better achieve its goals with the critical perspective of an outside user.

Many more classrooms are moving their curriculum online, whether by choice or circumstance. Purple Mai`a's ability to adapt, innovate, and embrace change on the fly have served Hawaiian teachers and students well over the years. Their emphasis on bridging Hawaiian culture with a valuable education provides them with a unique opportunity that they've ultimately succeeded at.

• Purple Mai`a is a technology education nonprofit whose mission is to teach coding and computer science to Native Hawaiian students.

Sandy Lai is a customer solutions architect at Heroku, and she is interviewing two employees at Panorama Education: Ben Small, a software engineer, and Mitch Peabody, an engineering manager. Panorama is a platform designed to help educators, teachers, and principals, understand their students and their community by offering feedback surveys. As different schools have different technical expertise in their districts, Panorama caters its product to meet those needs. Different schools have different systems in place--sometimes as many as two or three different platforms in the same district--and Panorama built technology to pull that disparate data into one location to provide holistic (and individual) views into the results.

The team at Panorama has found that schools largely rely on paper as they're extremely cautious about the data that is being shared on the kids in their classrooms. Security and privacy are top priorities for everyone at Panorama, from the CEO on down. They established a security working group to meet once a week and commit to making sure that security best practices are being taught and followed across the company. They also offer annual training for all employees on how to protect customer data.

Panorama's currently tackling challenges around scaling, both from its customers and as the business itself hires more employees. There is a certain seasonality to their work, where the Spring and Fall months tend to be the most active months on the platform. There's also the issue of timing, where hundreds of thousands of users log in at around the same time. To help offset this, Panorama rolls feature changes out across timezones. That is, when the schools on America's East Coast are finished around 3pm, new updates are deployed for that region, a process that continues westward. This way, they're able to ensure reliability without disruption to the future time zones for their end-of-day rush.

• Panorama Education helps educators use data to support each student's needs, and helps leaders build great schools.
• Panorama build their app using an event sourcing architecture

Charlie Gleason, a designer at Heroku and Salesforce, sits down for a special conversation with Margaret Francis, the SVP of Platform Data Services. Their conversation is around the unavoidable topic of COVID-19, quarantines, and the disruptions to normal life around the world. Margaret starts the conversation by briefly contextualizing the event against two other catastrophes she experienced: the DotCom Crash of 2000, and the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008. While those two incidents had very real consequences to the tech, real estate, and banking industries, this current pandemic feels different, not the least of which being that every facet of life has been disrupted.

Despite this, Margaret and Charlie keep their spirits up in a variety of ways. It's important to be radically honest with your family and coworkers about difficulties you're experiencing. You may just find that others have similar feelings, and sharing these thoughts can create stronger bonds of empathy. It's important too to try and find new ways every day to laugh, whether that's trying out a ridiculous haircut, or finding nonsensical videos online. Margaret advises trying to reconnect with a hobby you just haven't done in a long time. For her, that's reading, and she's recently picked up some of her favorite books that she knows will bring her joy. Trying out new activities can also lead you towards discovering new hobbies to enjoy, too, such as baking or sewing.

We will one day be out of quarantine, and the pair pontificate on what that might mean for societies across the globe. Change seems inevitable, whether that means the MTA will continue its recent practice of scrubbing New York City subway cars clean, or the continued extension of safety nets that governments are establishing. No matter what, it's important to try and keep touch with friends and family, and to keep in mind that when this is all over, we will hug each other once again.

Charlie Gleason, a designer and front end developer at Heroku, interviews Luis Alvarez. Luis is a data analyst intern at Heroku, and he got there through his involvement in Year Up. Year Up is akin to a bootcamp for young adults, divided into two phases. The first six months are a process of learning and development. Year Up pairs your interests with hands-on training in various subjects, such as data analytics, IT, and project management. There's consistent feedback from your classmates and you're constantly being evaluated on your progress. After this assessment, Year Up pairs students with companies. For example, students who excelled in data visualization courses will be matched to a company which requires that work.

Luis carries the discussion by listing out the aspects of Year Up which surprised him. He appreciated the amount of time which his mentors at Heroku allotted for him, and was able to make the commute from San Jose to San Francisco largely because Year Up provides a monthly stipend for all of its students. Learning to anticipate his colleagues' needs was also necessary, as Luis' primary role was collating and representing data as graphs for others to make use of. Through the process, Luis was able to solidify his communication skills.

In the end, Luis offers some advice for listeners who are keen to become future interns. He believes prospective Year Up students network should with as many people as they can, to ask for and suggest projects that coincide with their interests. Next, when it comes time to apply for jobs, he recommends an aggressive approach of applying to no less than three openings a day. As well, if you document the work you've been doing, you will find yourself with a portfolio which you can show to prospective employers.

• Year Up's mission is to close the Opportunity Divide by ensuring that young adults gain the skills, experiences, and support that will empower them to reach their potential through careers and higher education.

Julián Duque, a developer advocate at Heroku, interviews Nate Beck, the principal architect and founder of Pretzel Tech. Pretzel Tech is a company which has built Pretzel Rocks, a service that allows livestreamers to safely use licensed music. They do so by wrangling the needs of three different customers: broadcasters, who want to play fun music; record labels, which hold the rights to artists' music; and viewers, who want to play the same music at the same time as the broadcaster they are watching.

The technical ability to stream music is not terribly difficult; but the challenge lies in fanning that out, to thousands of listeners, all at once. When a streamer logs in, 20,000 users might get notified and jump onto the stream all at once within seconds. Pretzel deals with these network spikes in several ways. Although their backend is a basic Rails app hosted on Heroku, they use Lambda to handle the broadcast, as they don't have a constant stream of traffic requiring many dynos. They use a CDN with plenty of POPs around the world to host the music, ensuring that it's fast and stable for users. Other difficulties including dealing with the music industry. For a single popular song, Nate needs to coordinates with 28 different companies to agree on a licensing rate. The industry also uses a standard called DDEX, which is an XML format to track metadata for artists, albums, and releases. This requires a custom pipeline to parse.

Aside from that, Nate has nothing but praise for Twitch's API platform. The company is very community focused, with a public roadmap and excellent documentation for integratos. Its users often have plenty of positive feedback for Pretzel and other extensions. Pretzel's main focus right now is on ensuring the financial success for artists on the broadcasts of their music.

• Pretzel Rocks provides music for livestreamers
• 99 Lives is a record label which has a catalog stream-safe music
• Related: Pretzel Tech Handles Extreme Peaks in Demand with a Multi-Platform Architecture Centered on Heroku

Parker Phinney, creator of Interview Cake, continues his discussion from a previous episode with Julián Duque, a developer advocate at Heroku. Interview Cake provides different interview questions and programming exercise that adapt to the programming language that a candidate is working on. Since their coursework is essential to helping users succeed, they made an effort to ensure that the work was done accurately.

First, they provided their entire course curriculum in Python, the programming language they were most familiar with. Then, they hired a team of language experts to convert those Python lessons into various other languages. Finally, they hired a second team of experts to review the work of the first team. This two-pass system allowed them to bootstrap expertise in almost a dozen different languages.

Parker continues by discussing some of the challenges involved in this system, including keeping track of the work and managing the funds for various individuals. He also talks about various improvements they are making to the pipeline for their next iteration of content.