I often get asked, “what is the best way to get to know Heroku” by people in sales or consulting roles who want to explore Heroku opportunities with their customers or people (usually in management roles) who thinks Heroku might be useful in their organization and want to explore further. We could put together white papers, training tutorials and certification programs (indeed we may get to that one day). But there’s really no way to fake it. The only way you can credibly recommend Heroku to someone else is by being a Heroku user yourself.
It sounds obvious, but in a world where every second of the day is precious, it is natural for people to look for the quickest and most efficient way to learn something. Their first assumption is that it’s completely unrealistic to learn by actually building an app. It would take way too long. This is partly because they don’t know Heroku. They don’t know just how quickly you can go from idea to deployed app on this platform.
If you believe Heroku might be of interest to your company or to your client, but you still only have a high level understanding of the platform, you should set aside one week, perhaps two, to build an app. That’s all it takes. Build an app for your kid’s preschool, for your uncle’s one man shop or as an internal tool at work. It doesn’t matter.
As you build it, you will be browsing devcenter, googling questions that stackoverflow will probably answer and perhaps you’ll even file a support ticket. In the end, you will have a much better understanding of Heroku than you would have gotten from spending a week in a training class, watching videos online, reading books or going to conferences.
This Chinese proverb hung in the woodworking shop where I went after school as a kid:
I hear it and I forget it
I see it and I remember it
I do it and I understand it