Category: Engineering
Why Postgres
Apps to Services
Sphinx Build Pack on Heroku
Securing your Internal Organization with OpenID
How Heroku Works - Hiring
I alluded in earlier posts of How Heroku Works that we have talented engineers. In fact I would venture to say that there is not a weak link when it comes to our engineers at Heroku. Ensuring we have talented engineers makes it easier for us to find other talented engineers and maintains a level of quality in our product. This means we must be very careful about not diluting our pool of engineering talent, which is where our hiring process becomes especially key. By the time we hire a new employee, we know without a doubt they’re a fit within our organization.
Our goal in hiring is seldom to fill a role, but more commonly to find more talented people share our goal (changing the world for developers).
How Heroku Works - Maker's Day
In my earlier post on Teams and Tools at Heroku, I mentioned how we value engineers’ time; their work has enabled us to build a great platform. As a result of what we’ve built, we’ve had great growth both of our platform and of our teams internally. With that growth inevitably comes different distractions on engineers’ time. Despite how a manager may plan things, engineering work needs long periods of uninterrupted time. To ensure that no matter what, an engineer has plenty of opportunity to do the work he or she was hired to do, Heroku has Maker’s Day.
How Heroku Works - Teams and Tools
Heroku is a largely agile company, we work in primarily small teams that talk via api and data contracts. Its also a company comprised primarily of engineers, even product managers often write code. Heroku as a platform drives many of the features not from top down, but from bottom up based on engineers desires or skunkworks projects. There’s many valuable insights into how Heroku runs efficiently for engineering.
I’ll be diving into many various practices that enable Heroku to put quality engineering above all else, but first let me highlight the team structure and tools that enable this.