June 15, 2020
In the “Moving Away From AWS and Onto Heroku” article, I provided an introduction of the application I wanted to migrate from Amazon’s popular AWS solution to Heroku. Subsequently, the “Destination Heroku” article illustrated the establishment of a new Heroku account and focused on introducing a Java API (written in Spring Boot) connecting to a ClearDB instance within this new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) ecosystem.
June 9, 2020
Do you have an app on Heroku using Postgres? Are you running out of database connections? Maybe you’ve already tried setting CONN_MAX_AGE, but that only helped for a while. It’s time for PgBouncer, the de facto standard for Postgres connection pooling. In this article, we’ll look at how to use PgBouncer to scale your app on Heroku. We’ll use Django, a popular python web framework, as an example for the settings.
May 22, 2020
I love side projects. They give me the opportunity to flex my creative muscles and tinker with tech like the Internet of Things (IoT) in new ways. Fortunately, I didn’t have to look far for my next one; a common conundrum for pet owners fueled this concept for an IoT dog collar.
May 21, 2020
In today’s economy, more and more companies exist primarily online. While there’s much discussion around the consequences of leaving behind the traditional brick and mortar business, one aspect that gets less attention is the significant change in how these companies are now managing their data. Increasingly, businesses seek to understand their customers and how best to meet their needs in a way that monthly reports and KPI charts just can’t address.
May 19, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic and statewide stay-at-home order have caused many companies, including mine, to close their offices, restrict travel, and require all employees to work remotely. This has caused a major shift in how people interact. But what has made it more manageable is the fact that most of my colleagues and I already knew each other on some level. But what about that new hire who signed on just days after the stay-at-home order went into effect?
May 15, 2020
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are best practices in today’s software engineering development process. **Continuous integration (CI)**allows developers to automate running test suites and other jobs on each pull request created in their projects. These jobs must pass before merging the code changes into the master branch. This creates confidence in the master version of the code and ensures that one developer doesn’t break things for every other developer working out of the same codebase.
May 15, 2020
You’ve just released your new app into the wild, live in production. Success! Now what? Your job is done, right? Wrong. Now that you’ve deployed your code, it’s time to monitor it, collect data, and analyze your metrics. Without application performance monitoring in place, you can’t accurately determine how well things are going. Are people using your app? Is the app performant? Do the pages load quickly? Are your users experiencing any errors?
May 7, 2020
In the “Moving Away From AWS and Onto Heroku” article, I provided an introduction of the application I wanted to migrate from Amazon’s popular AWS solution to Heroku. Subsequently, the “Destination Heroku” article illustrated the establishment of a new Heroku account and focused on introducing a Java API (written in Spring Boot) connecting to a ClearDB instance within this new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) ecosystem. My primary goal is to find a solution that allows my limited time to be focused on providing business solutions instead of getting up to speed with DevOps processes.
May 1, 2020
[In the second part of his series, a Zone Leader begins the process of using Heroku for the very first time. In this article, he walks through the new account process, then performs the necessary setup of a database and RESTful API for use with the application built for a family member.]
April 29, 2020
Welcome back! In the first part of this series, we looked at a very “low-level” way to interact with a relational database by sending it raw SQL strings and retrieving the results. We created a very simple Express application that we can use as an example and deployed it on Heroku with a Postgres database.
