This is how it works for us. When we hire a marketing group, we'll work through the process, do case studies, etc. But it's more fun to write technical content.

I think the thing you're looking for is subtextual. A thing you may not have noticed about serious hosting providers is that none of them run general-purpose container workloads in multitenant Docker. You have to do something like we're doing to host Docker containers for multiple organizations. Docker itself --- shared Linux kernels --- simply aren't isolated enough to protect customers from each other.

So: what we're describing isn't some breakthrough in hosting technology --- we're literally shoplifting the engine Amazon wrote to do the same thing --- but rather just explaining how we put these pieces together for our own product.

If I wanted to talk about things that were unique to Fly, I'd talk about our Anycast CDN and the way it automatically plugs into Fly apps, so that they are, out of the box, globally connected. Or about how we manage certificates, which we (I had nothing to do with it) apparently nailed the UX for so well that people use us just for that.

But that wasn't the point of this post; it really was just an effort to talk through some of the technical decisions we made.

I just mean that rather than just seek out technologies for the sake of technologies, I seek out people that I respect and see what they're tinkering with, or what they've built, and how they arrived at solutions to many of the problems that most of us face.

There are certain people whose skills and judgement I respect, that I feel I know well enough about how they reason about things (as well as you can know following them on the internet), that if they're saying this thing is good, I trust that.

One example is Yehuda Katz, who was a ruby on rails and jQuery core dev team member, now spends most of his time on Ember.js. I may not always agree with him (although it's rare) but I have found that his approach to engineering is just really well-rounded and well-reasoned. So you can totally see how he arrived at his conclusions. Like why to even put time into working on something like Ember.js, rather than joining yet another core team.

Another set of folks are the Hashicorp founders – over the years their approach to the industry and how they build out their solutions has really resonated with me. So I tend to trust just about anything they build.

Similarly, I feel someone like tptacek isn't just a security nerd but is able to articulate where the importance of security fits in with an org, with users, with businesses, with tradeoffs, etc etc etc, and seems to have a clarity in communication that I admire. Similarly, the fact that they are able to so confidently explain every aspect of their stack shows that not only are they proud of what they've accomplished, that they don't feel this is going to hurt them competitively. And the more I read about the stack, the more I keep nodding my head and just smiling at the sheer elegance in how they built it out. And I am actually someone who never really got on the Heroku bandwagon. It just never felt right.

So I'm looking forward to really trying it out.