blog: I Miss Heroku's DevEx

Signed-off-by: Xe Iaso <me@christine.website>
2022-05-05 14:58:41 +00:00 · 2022-05-05 14:58:41 +00:00 · 6be7bd7613
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 ---
 title: "I Miss Heroku's DevEx"
 date: 2022-05-12
 ---
 If you've never really experienced it before, it's gonna sound really weird.
 Basically the main way that Heroku worked is that they would set up a git remote
 for each "app" it hosted. Each "app" had its source code in a git repo and a
 "Procfile" that told Heroku what to do with it. So when it came time to deploy
 that app, you'd just `git push heroku main` and then Heroku would just go off
 and build that app and run it _somewhere_ in the cloud. You got back a HTTPS URL
 and then bam you have a website.
 The developer experience didn't stop there. Most of how Heroku apps are
 configured are via environment variables, and there were addons that let you
 tell Heroku things like "hi yes I would like one (1) postgres please" and the
 platform would spin up a database somewhere and drop a config variable into the
 app's config. It was magic. Things just worked and it left you free to go do
 what made you money.
 Heroku's free tier got me the in I needed to make my career really start. If I
 didn't have something like Heroku in my life I doubt that my career would be the
 same or even I would be the same person I am today. It's really hard to describe
 what having access to a platform that lets you turn ideas into production
 quality code does to your output ability. I even ended up reinventing Heroku a
 few times in my career (working for Deis and later reinventing most of the core
 of Heroku as a project between jobs), but nothing really hit that same level of
 wonder/magic that Heroku did.
 I ended up working there and when I did I understood why Heroku had fallen so
 much. Heroku is owned by Salesforce and Salesforce doesn't really understand
 what they had acquired with Heroku. Heroku had resisted integration into the
 larger Salesforce organization and as a result was really really starved for
 headcount. I had to have a come-to-jesus meeting with the CTO of Heroku where I
 spelled out my medical needs and how the insurance that the contracting agency
 they were using was insufficent (showing comparisons between bills for blood
 draws where paying with the insurance ended up costing me more than not using
 it). I got hired and then that was just in time for Salesforce to really start
 pulling Heroku into the fold.
 The really great part about working at Heroku was that setting up a new service
 was so easy that the majority of the productionalization checklist was just
 enabling hidden feature flags to lock down the app. I'm surprised that didn't
 get streamlined.
 The Heroku I joined no longer exists. I joined Heroku but I left Salesforce. I
 can't blame any of my coworkers from Heroku from fleeing the sinking ship. The
 ship has been sinking for years but the culture of Heroku really stuck around
 long enough that it was hard to realize the shop was sinking.
 It can really be seen with how long it's taken Heroku to react to [that one
 horrible security event](https://status.heroku.com/incidents/2413) they've been
 dealing with. Based on what I remember about the internal architecture (it was a
 microservices tire fire unlike you have ever seen, it's part of the inspiration
 that lead me to write [this post](/blog/make-microservices-cluster-2022-01-27))
 and the notes that have been put on the public facing status page, I'm guessing
 that most of Heroku is "legacy" code (IE: nobody on the team that made this
 service works here anymore) at this point. When I was there most of the services
 on my team were "legacy" code that was production-facing, load-bearing and
 overall critical to the company succeeding; but it was built to be reliable
 enough that we could overall ignore it until it was actually falling over. But
 then because of the ways that things were chorded together it could take a very
 long time to actually fix issues because the symptoms were all over the place.
 Don't get me wrong, I loved working there but it was mostly for the people. That
 and the ability to say that I helped make Heroku better for the next generation.
 If you've ever used the metrics tab on Heroku, chances are that you've
 encountered my code indirectly. If you've ever done Heroku threshold autoscaling
 or response time alerting, you've dealt with code I helped write. The body of
 Heroku remains but the soul has long since fled.
 At the few points of my career that I have tried to reinvent Heroku (be it on my
 own or working for a company doing that), there has mostly been this weird
 realization that in order to have a thing like Heroku exist it really needs to
 be hosted by someone else in the cloud. One of the places I worked for was
 selling self-hosted Heroku on top of CoreOS and fleetd (remember fleetd? that
 was magical) and while it did have a lot of the same developer experience, it
 never really had the same magic feeling. I had the same problem with my own
 implementation. Sure you can get the app hosting part of Heroku fairly easily
 (and with Docker being as mature as it was at that point yeah it was fairly
 easy). But when it comes to the real experience of addons and the whole
 ecosystem there, you really need either to get very lucky or become an industry
 standard. Realistically though, you aren't going to be either lucky or an
 industry standard and then you need to also reinvent the next 80% of Heroku from
 scratch on hardware that you don't control. It's no wonder that ultimately
 failed (even though one of them was bought out by Microsoft after doing a weird
 Kubernetes pivot).
 There was something really magical about the whole thing that I really miss to
 this day. Heroku was at least a decade ahead of its time as far as developer
 experience goes. Things Just Worked in ways that would probably put a lot of us
 out of jobs if they really took off. I miss the process for putting something on
 the internet to just be a `git push` and trust that the machine will just take
 care of it. I wonder if we'll ever really have something like that on top of Nix
 or NixOS.
 ---
 If you're reading this before the 12th, welcome to an experiment! I've been
 wondering about how to make some of my posts Patreon exclusive for a week. This
 post was published for my patrons on the 5th of May. Please don't share this
 link around on social media until the 12th, but privately sharing it is okay.