[rtpg]

Fly has consistently surprised me at how late they have been to doing the "standard company" stuff. Their sort of lack of support engineering teams for a while affected me way more though.

You gotta take the Legos away from the CEO! Being CEO means you stop doing the other stuff! Sorry!

And yes they have their silly disclaimer on their blog, but this is Yet Another "oh lol we made a whoopsie" tone that they've taken in the past several times for "real" issues. My favorite being "we did a thing, you should have read the forums where we posted about it, but clearly some of you didn't". You have my e-mail address!

Please.... please... get real comms. I'm tired of the "oh lol we're just doing shit" vibes from the only place I can _barely_ recommend as an alternative to Heroku. I don't need the cuteness. And 60% of that is because one of your main competitors has a totally unsearchable name.

Still using fly, just annoyed.

[akerl_]

I don't know where the official list of "standard company" stuff is, but I'd wager that for small to medium sized tech companies, it's relatively unsurprising for "leadership" to still be in the weeds on various operational projects and systems.

[nberkman]

Don't know why this is getting downvoted. Agree with this so hard, as a continually aggrieved Fly customer (close to becoming an ex-customer). The too cool for school schtick gets old fast when they don't have the goods to back it up.

[tptacek]

We've had an unusually large security team for the size of our company since 2021. I'm sorry if you don't like the way I communicate about it but I have no plans to change that. We take security extremely seriously. We just didn't take Twitter that seriously.

The "CEO" thing is just a running joke. Kurt's an engineer. Any of us could have been taken by this. I joke about this because I assume everybody gets the subtext, which is that anything you don't have behind phishing-resistant authentication is going to get phished. You apparently took it on the surface level, and believe I'm actually dunking on Kurt. No.

[rtpg]

I'm not talking security, which I generally feel like is probably being done correctly.

I was thinking about, IIRC, back in 2023[0], where you all were suffering a lot of issues. And I _believe_ I saw some chatter about Fly building out a team of support/devops-y/SRE engineers around that time. And I had just assumed up until there that, as a company about operations, that you would already have a team that is about reliability.

I am not a major user of you (You're only selling me like 40 bucks a month of compute/storage/etc), but I had relatively often been hitting weird stuff. Some of it was me, some of it was your side. But... well... I was using Heroku for this stuff before and it seemed to run swimmingly for very long. So I was definitely a bit like "oh OK so you just didn't care about reliability until then?" I mean this lightly, but I started basically anti-recommending you after the combo of the issues and the statements your team was making (both on this kind of operations and also communications after the fact).

I think you all generally do this better now though, so maybe I'm just bringing up old grudges.

> You apparently took it on the surface level, and believe I'm actually dunking on Kurt.

No, I took it in the same tone I take a lot of your company's writing.

> The "CEO" thing is just a running joke. Kurt's an engineer.

I think if you are the CEO of a company above a certain (very low!) headcount you put down the Legos. There are enough "running a company" things to do. Maybe your dynamics are different, since your team is indeed quite small according to the teams page.

Every startup engineer has had to deal with "The CEO is the one with admin rights on this account and he's not doing the thing because somehow we haven't pried the credentials from him so that people doing the work does it". And then the dual of this, "The CEO fixes the thing at 2AM but does it the wrong way and now thing is weird". A way you avoid this is by yanking all credentials from the CEO.

I'm being glib here, because obviously y'all have your success, the Twitter thing "doesn't matter", etc. I just want to be able to recommend you fully, and the issues I hit + the amateur hour comms in response (EDIT: in the past) gets on my nerves and prevents me from doing it!

Anyways, I want you all to succeed.

[0]: https://community.fly.io/t/reliability-its-not-great/11253