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by betteryet 138 days ago
Back in the day, Heroku, Stripe, and GitHub were iconic engineering organizations. They had this culture rooted in Unix ethos with a sprinkle of modern minimalism and style that was outstanding. You could really see people give a damn in the careful design and polish of their APIs, docs, primitives, and overall output.

Now Heroku and GitHub have been gutted in spirit by their acquirers, which is such a damn shame for our field. We still have Stripe and Apple to some extent, and maybe some new places, but I personally feel a real sense of loss from Heroku and GitHub exiting their status as places you could admire.
1 comments
trvz 138 days ago
Amongst the people opting for just plain Linux servers Linode was the big name back then. They later got supplanted by DigitalOcean, and both are of course also run into the ground by now.
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bjt 137 days ago
Digital Ocean is run into the ground? I've been with them for a long time and recently just launched new stuff. Still a pretty nice experience and a pretty decent price.
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re-thc 137 days ago
Yes, they haven’t updated their infrastructure in a long time. Pricing hence isn’t competitive.

With each new generation they fall behind.

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bjt 136 days ago
Maybe? I could see that happening.

I could also see them being compared with companies still using venture capital to give stuff away for free. In that case, I'm OK with that tradeoff. I'm not really excited about changing my infrastructure every few years to keep getting a free lunch.

The Digital Ocean app platform I recently migrated to is a lot newer than the "rent a VPS" model that they've had forever. Yes, it's not free like the Vercel and Cloudflare Workers I've also used recently. But it also doesn't force my app into a weird shape or to use their preferred language.

On a continuum where AWS sits at one boring+expensive end of the spectrum, and all the subsidized-pricing "we might not be here tomorrow" PaaSes sit at the other, I like the in-between spot where DO sits.

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re-thc 135 days ago
> Maybe? I could see that happening.

It already is. Besides dedicated options (which are just as expensive) - those shared cores are so old the performance compared to current line AWS models is so far out that it isn't competitive.

> I could also see them being compared with companies still using venture capital to give stuff away for free. In that case, I'm OK with that tradeoff.

That's not the point. They are more expensive compared to hyperscalers.

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