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asenchiHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

It remains the greatest engineering team I've ever seen or had the pleasure to be a part of

It remains the greatest engineering team I've ever seen or had the pleasure to be a part of. I was only there from early 2011 to mid 2012 but what I took with me changed me as an engineer. The shear brilliance of the ideas and approaches...I was blessed to witness it. I don't think I can overstate it, though many will think this is all hyperbole. I didn't always agree with the decisions made and I was definitely there when the product stagnation started, but we worked hard to reduce tech debt, build better infrastructure, and improve... but man, the battles we fought. Many fond memories, including the single greatest engineering mistake I've ever seen made, one that I still think about until this day (but will never post in a public forum :)). It was a pleasure working with you bgentry!

Original discussionAn Update on Heroku352 source comments · at import
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BG
bgentryHN

As somebody whose first day working at Heroku was the day this acquisition closed, I think it’s mostly a misconception to blame Salesforce for Heroku’s stagnation and eventual irrelevance. Salesforce gave Heroku a ton of funding to build out a vision that was way ahead of its time. Docker didn’t even come out until 2013, AWS didn’t even have multiple regions when it was built. They mostly served as an investor and left us alone to do our thing, or so it seemed those first couple years. The launch of the multi language Cedar runtime in 2011 led to incredible growth and by 2012 we were drowning in tech debt and scaling challenges. Despite more than tripling our headcount in that first year (~20 to 74) we could not keep up. Mid 2012 was especially bad as we were severely impacted by two us-east-1 outages just 2 weeks apart. To the extent it wasn’t already, reliability and paying down tech d…

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FolconHN

I'm just going to chime in here and say thank you, there still really isn't in my mind a comparable offering to heroku's git push and go straight to a reasonable production I honestly find it a bit nuts, there's offerings that come close, but using them I still get the impression that they've just not put in the time really refining that user interface, so I just wanted to say thank you for the work you and the GP did, it was incredibly helpful and I'm happy to say helped me launch and test a few product offerings as well as some fun ideas

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brabelHN

> by 2012 we were drowning in tech debt and scaling challenges. > the greatest engineering team I've ever seen How do these two things reconcile in your opinion? In my view , doing something quickly is the easy part , good engineering is only needed exactly when you want things to be maintainable and scalable, so the assertions above don’t really make much sense to me.

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whitepoplarHN

Tell us more about some of these ideas and approaches that changed you as an engineer! We'd love to hear!

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