When I read the blog , I had also thought Heroku was done. Then I talked to my friends who still work there, and I don't think Heroku is dead.
I don't want to drill on about myself, but it warrants being transparent so you see where my perspectives come from.
I was the tech lead of the production engineering operations experiences team. My team owned, operated, and developed over thirty internal services between 2021 and 2024, covering AWS accounts management, AWS resource introspection, CloudTrail log ingestion pipeline, vulnerability report system, internal service catalog, centralized secrets management, AWS ODCR management, AWS credentials provisioning, certificate management, DNS management, Infrastructure-as-code,OSQuery fleet, etc.
I directly served all of the Heroku engineering teams. I ran 9-11 projects in parallel at any given time. I reported to a manager in Argentina, and mentored three Argentinian engineers on my team. I published 6 technical design docs in a year. I worked with all of the architects. We interfaced with dozens of Salesforce teams from security, compliance, and reliability orgs₂. I wrote a platform and named it uwu, I publicly criticized Heroku for its naming traditions₃. uwu was part of a larger project that was meant to address the pains that I am about to talk about. I made our CEO at the time say uwu in chat during the presentation of this platform, that was my career shitposting peak, I think. I had a Minecraft video in that presentation, man I had so much fun.
In the subsequent times, many of my former colleagues will likely share their insights on the fall of Heroku. Each of us will have a unique view, generated from our own experiences. I know a few folks who would have very thoughtful things to say about things like product engineering, visions, marketing, directions, perhaps even management and leadership. I am going to offer an adjacent side of things, with a focus on organization dynamics in a start-up post acquisition, and how complex system dynamics and poorly-mitigated entropy can get the best of us.
The pains I've witnessed and lessons I'm about to share are not unique to Heroku. They are a part of larger patterns I've observed in tech across many roles and shared stories. This read will be valuable to people who work at, operate, or care about a tech company making software for other tech companies, with software products that are well-rounded enough to transition from mid-market to enterprise either now or some time in the future. Readers will walk away with some pains and lessons learned about growth, or un-growth, pains.
Here are the questions every tech person writing about a former employer must ask oneself:
am I sharing things in an ethical and legal way
does this benefit or hurt my former employer, and the people still working there, whom I care about
These are the questions heavy on my mind as I write this piece: what is ok to share with the public and what is not? I am being very cautious, I want to share lessons learned, and retro in a blameless way.
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