In this episode of the Convergence podcast, host Ashok Sivanand sits down with Wes Beary from Anchor.dev. Wes shares his journey, from helping shape Heroku’s engineering culture to his work today in API design and encryption as a service. Discover how Wes' experience at Heroku and his open-source contributions have shaped his views on building delightful developer experiences and empowering engineering teams. He also talks about the importance of uniformity in API design, fostering a strong engineering culture, and scaling development teams while preserving their core strengths.

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Inside the episode:

• Wes Beary’s transition from game development to cloud infrastructure and open-source contributions
• The creation of Heroku’s command-line interface (CLI) and API development process
• Best practices in API design and the importance of consistency for developers
• Insights into fostering engineering culture and maintaining it as teams grow
• The role of Anchor.dev in simplifying encryption for engineering teams without dedicated security resources
• Lessons from Heroku’s rise to success and what makes a platform as a service valuable
• Balancing innovation, team culture, and enabling versus gatekeeping in engineering organizations

Mentioned in this episode:

• Anchor.dev – Get started with Anchor.dev at https://lcl.host/
• Heroku – Platform as a service, acquired by Salesforce
• Kobo Readers
• Fog – Wes Beary's open-source project for cloud API integration

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