![]() ![]() The first time I built an app with Heroku was for a joke with friends. We were discussing some pretty serious topics in a group chat: the pandemic, politics, and our own personal struggles. I wanted to create a bot that would help lighten the mood. I didn’t expect to scale from just a few dozen memes between friends to 9.8 million people overnight. I wanted to put the app online quickly, so the first place I looked was (of course) Google. ![]() Heroku came up as an ideal option - it’s a cloud platform that anyone can use to build and scale apps quickly. In a few hours our “inside joke bot” was up and running. It would respond to keywords with memes, funny images, or even a little back-and-forth banter. I noticed that the simpler I made the bot’s features, the more my friends interacted with it. My humorous software actually began to feel human. Why I picked Heroku: speed, integrations, and ease of use I was able to make immediate improvements based on my friends’ feedback and saw firsthand how easy it was to build apps using Heroku. When I made Bernie Sits, I didn’t imagine it would go viral. I just wanted to make a fun app and put it online as quickly as possible. I knew from my previous chatbot experience that Heroku lets me update my app in real time if I run into any snags. Turn your ideas into reality using Heroku However, I didn’t expect to scale from just a few dozen memes between friends to 9.8 million people overnight. See why companies have built more than 9 million apps on Heroku. Learn more Building my viral app took only an hour I started with a public image of Bernie Sanders that my friend cropped. I used a simple template and some basic code - and before I knew it, Bernie Sits was live! I knew Heroku was really easy to integrate with other apps, so I chose Google Maps because it would let me put Bernie anywhere in the world. I soon realized it was working on my computer but not publicly on the internet, and it was at that point that I sent out a desperate tweet asking for help. I thought for sure that would be the end of my story, but Salesforce Director of Technical Architecture, Dan Mehlman, happened to see it. Within 30 minutes, I was on a call with Senior Solutions Engineer Jack Ziesing, who had sent me a meeting invite link and waited patiently for me just in case I showed up to the call. I didn’t want my first meeting with a real engineer at a real company to be embarrassing. But it turned out that the people from Heroku made an almost bigger impact on me than the actual capabilities of the product. ![]()
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