One of the disadvantages to doing a coding bootcamp is that you don't get much experience writing code in a production environment. This may be why I've had such a hard time moving my project backends onto Heroku.

The process introduced relatively foreign concepts, such as working with a production environment.

What's the difference?

The development environment is your local computer, while the production environment is the live product customers or visitors might interact with.

Since it can be hard to remember new technical vocabulary, I've used the following mnemonic:

• development –> developer coding on their computer
• production –> product i.e. the final product

Why do these terms matter?

If you're still coding mostly on your computer, with no intention of shipping your product, exploring the production environment isn't as urgent.

But hosting my backend with Heroku forced me to create the production version of the database and to update my database.yml file with the proper settings.

While making the changes themselves weren't difficult, knowing that and why I to create them took a couple of hours to understand. To keep this blog to 1-2 min, I will cover those changes in another blog.

This video covers the two above, as well as, some additional environments you will come across.