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