110. Scaling a Bernie Meme

This episode is a conversation led by Greg Nokes, a Product Manager with Salesforce, Dan Mehlman, a Director of Technical Architecture for Salesforce, Mike Rose, a Director of Technical Architecture for Salesforce, Jack Ziesing, a Technical Architect with Salesforce. They're interviewing Nick Sawhney, a college student who saw an opportunity to make his friends laugh and built something that grew beyond his wildest dreams. At the 2021 US Inauguration, a single shot of Bernie Sanders sitting in a chair captured the hearts of many on the Internet. People everywhere were photoshopping him in the unlikeliest of places. Nick utilized his Python skills and quickly built a Heroku app that would allow users to place Bernie anywhere in the world, by adding him to any image available on Google Street View.

To say the app was a success was an understatement. Inundated by tweets and distracted by press requests, Nick couldn't devote the time needed to keep the app stable and operational. He sent out a desperate tweet for help, only to be picked up by no less than Dan and Michael, who recruited Jack to help Nick with his operational issues. They paired together in a number of ways, optimizing Jack's Python code, securing its authentication logic, and autoscaling dynos in order to handle the waves of traffic. All of these rapid changes allowed Nick to step back and engage with fans on where they'd like to take Bernie next.

In addition to a newfound gratitude towards Heroku's team, Nick learned a few lessons from this experience. He was really humbled by the availability of the engineering community to donate their time and knowledge to help his issues. It's also inspired him to create videos to teach others how they can mitigate scaling issues in their architecture before it becomes a problem. He's also hoping to create some open source tools that to monitor things like server costs and availability issues for other small projects.

Episode source