Search overlay panel for performing site-wide searches
Salesforce (Heroku) Named a Leader. Learn More!

James Lindenbaum

Heroku Staff

RailsConf Schedule

RailsConf starts tomorrow and Heroku will be there in full force. Here’s our line up: Monday, 1:30pm — A Hat Full of Tricks with Sinatra Our very own Blake Mizerany, the creator of Sinatra, is giving a tutorial on Sinatra. Ryan Tomayko will be on hand as well. Tuesday, 1:50pm — The Future of Deployment: A Killer Panel Join me as I moderate a panel on deployment, with a truly killer group: Marc-André Cournoyer (creator of Thin), Christian Neukirchen (creator of Rack), Ryan Tomayko (Rack core team, creator of Rack::Cache, Sinatra core team), Blake Mizerany (creator of Sinatra), and Adam…

Commercial Launch

When Adam, Orion, and I started Heroku two years ago, we had no idea how much new technology we would have to build to realize our vision of an instant platform for Ruby that just works. Luckily, we were able to attract an amazing team to work on this problem with us, and the team has really shaped Heroku into the offering it is today. We’re currently by far the fastest and easiest deployment platform for Ruby, and we’ve gotten great feedback on our provisionless hosting architecture. We have over 25,000 apps running on the platform today, and many of…

Deployment That Just Works

Last week I talked a bit about why instant deployment matters. A few people have since commented that it’s not instant deployment that matters to them, but rather deployment that just works every time. Of course, what we’re really talking about is both. Part of achieving deployment that just works is decreasing complexity and removing steps – each a point of possible failure. We are working toward deployment that’s both instant and completely reliable, because we think those things are tightly linked. We’ve rolled out some new content today explaining more about how our platform works, including some more detailed…

Why Instant Deployment Matters

How much better are two steps than three? Does it matter if something takes five minutes instead of twenty? When it comes to software deployment and provisioning, does instant really matter? Recently, I was ranting on this subject to a user who had the misfortune of asking me about it in person. “Truly instant provisioning and deployment is the ultimate goal,” I said. “10 seconds isn’t good enough. We have to –”, “Look,” he interrupted, “I love what you guys are doing and don’t want you to stop, but why are you so obsessed with this?” My immediate answer: because…

What’s Up at Heroku

2008 was a very, very big year for Heroku. We launched the first version of the platform, picked up some world-class investors, expanded the team with some amazing talent (there are 10 of us now), spoke at a zillion conferences about Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, the web stack, and cloud computing, and have grown like crazy. Private Beta Most importantly, we’ve had an incredibly successful private beta. We launched it less than a year ago, and we have well over 20,000 apps running on Heroku today. This is one of the largest collections of Rails apps in the world, ranging from…

Heroku & Redpoint Ventures

We are happy this morning to announce we’ve raised a $3 million round of funding, from Redpoint Ventures and some other great investors. Adam, Orion, and I started Heroku with the goal of making software development much easier and more accessible. We’ve got big plans – what we’ve done so far is really just the first step. There is so much we’ve been dying to do, but we just haven’t had the capacity. This investment will allow us to beef up our current offerings, expand into other parts of the development process, and build out the company to support our…

Heroku on the Rails Podcast

If you’re curious about our vision for Heroku, check out the latest episode of the Ruby on Rails Podcast. We spoke with Geoffrey Grosenbach about our plans for Heroku, the Rails ecosystem, and some good old fashioned economics.

Some More Q & A

What about gems, plugins, and different Rails versions? We are definitely going to support gems and plugins. We are almost finished with a slick gem and plugin installer you can use for each app. In the meantime, you can install plugins by importing or uploading the files directly into vendor/plugins. Currently, we only support the latest stable version of Rails. You can use a different version by uploading a frozen vendor/rails, but this may not work because of the 10MB storage limit constraint (rake rails:freeze:edge won’t work, by the way, because there are no outgoing network connections yet – we’ll…

Some Q & A

How long before I get in? We are sending out tons of invites every day. We’d prefer not to have a waiting list, but doing it this way allows us to let people in only as we’re sure our infrastructure can handle the load. The number of people we let in each day keeps increasing, as our existing users give us feedback (thanks guys!) which helps us improve our product for the next batch of people coming in. One of the areas we are most interested in is collaboration – this is, after all, a web application. We want to…

1,000+ Signups: The Floodgates are Open

A couple of weeks ago we quietly started accepting signups for our private beta. We knew people would be excited about Heroku; I mean, we’re pretty excited about it. Word seems to have gotten out, as over the last several days well over 1,000 people have signed up. We are inviting users off the waiting list all day, every day, as fast as we can. So we’re also receiving a constant stream now of feedback email. Some quotes: OH – MY – GOD, Heroku! It’s absolutely great. In my opinion, it’s really a revolution in Rails development. – Chris Wow.…

Subscribe to the full-text RSS feed for James Lindenbaum.