We recently sat down for a chat with Bill Curtis, a co-founder and the CTO of Sweet Tooth (Now Smile.io), a points and rewards app for online stores worldwide.

What has been your greatest challenge?

We’re serving way more data today than we ever have, so scaling is mission-critical. In the past, we’ve struggled with traffic spikes. For example, there are seasonal spikes, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. There are also spikes from merchant activity, such as load testing stores or importing a large number of orders.

I recently tweeted our requests-per-hour graph. It showed that during the huge spikes for this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday, our product availability was seamless on...

Last week, Terence Lee and I caught up with Tom Dale at EmberConf to talk about FastBoot, when you should avoid native apps, and why JavaScript on the server and the browser might start to converge. Check the end for the full recording!

So let's start with the drama, would you say Ember has declared war on native apps? [laughs]

[sigh] Yeah. Yeah, I think that's fair. Yeah. Sure. Why not? Let's go with that.

A lot of other frameworks, take this approach of bringing web technologies and dropping them into native experiences - React Native being the prime example. It seems that Ember wants to bring back the glory days for web technologies - is that right?

Yeah, absolutely. I...

Matthew Eckstein is the VP of Engineering for charity: water. For more information, visit: www.charitywater.org. Read our charity: water customer story to learn more about how Heroku has helped their organization deliver clean water to millions of people around the world.

Tell us a bit about charity: water

charity: water is a non-profit organization that brings clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations all around the world.

We rebuilt our online fundraising and donation platform on Heroku and are super excited to share our story today, March 22nd on World Water Day.

When we first moved to Heroku, we decided to rebuild our system from the ground up. The engineering...

Whether they're publishing notifications, responding to /slash commands or carrying a conversation, bots have become an integral part of the way we work with Slack. A bot can do any number of things for your team as part of your day-to-day work, you're only limited by your imagination. For some first-hand experience, check out the Heroku Button Gallery, where users have created all types of bots: from fun bots like poker and Jeopardy!, to more practical ones like a bot that tracks the satisfaction of your team members or one that reminds your team to review existing pull requests.

That said, the real power and fun of Slack bots comes once you know how to build your own. In this...

Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Vitali Margolin is the Head of R&D for Roomer. Vitali leads a team of seven developers who built and operate the travel marketplace www.roomertravel.com and the travel protection service Life Happens, both running on Heroku.

What are you running on Heroku?

The four big projects are: the Roomer website, our administration app, our partner network and B2B website, and the Roomer API. The Roomer API is our highest load app. It can get up to 10k requests per minute from partner integrations such as Kayak. We have a few more technical products, including an app that does text recognition and automatically decodes confirmation emails, as well as a smart pricing...

In 2013, Rafael Ördög put poker and code together, the result: Lean Poker, a competitive coding event that teaches continuous deployment and lean startup methodologies. Rafael is based in Budapest, Hungary.

What's Lean Poker?

Lean Poker is a coding workshop that is designed to teach people how to practice continuous deployment and lean startup methodologies. Companies can sponsor a free public event or hold an internal, team-building event for their own employees.

The basic starting code is really simple and teams can use the language of their choice. The challenge is not to understand an existing code base but to modify it—to build a new app. Teams must iterate their app quickly in...

Most modern mobile apps depend heavily on the app’s back-end. That’s because many of the expectations users have for mobile apps today -- for the application to work regardless of network connectivity, to notify them when relevant content changes, to have integrations with the social networks they use, for appropriate levels of security, and a hundred other things -- are reliant on the app’s back-end services.

The most common pattern for mobile back-ends we see today is for developers to design, build and maintain their back-end architectures on Heroku. This approach is as flexible as it is powerful, but it requires significant engineering effort. A faster alternative would be to use a...

We’re very excited that our Heroku colleagues Matz, Nobu and Ko1 will all be visiting from Japan soon to attend RubyConf, and it’s especially serendipitous that it is happening in such close proximity to Thanksgiving. Not only is Thanksgiving one of the few holidays that Japan and the U.S. share, it’s a holiday that brings families together to reflect on what’s been accomplished, and to share insight into the future. We've been waiting for just the right opportunity to organize a small Ruby gathering and Thanksgiving provides the perfect setting.

"I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary...