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Comment by hthrowaway5 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Heroku was an incredible success but using it in 2022 would be downright negligence.

(Although I would argue that Salesforce was also responsible for creating most of what we love about Heroku. That acquisition happened far earlier than people realize. They're also almost entirely responsible for its downfall.)

EDIT: Craig is right below (and he pretty much always is). When I said "created" I really meant in terms of giving them enough financial resources to keep building. SFDC exerted no influence in terms of product decisions early on (so far as I know). Re-reading my post I see that wasn't clear.

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That Salesforce created it was wrong. That Heroku was already that way, yes also re-painting history. Cedar and buildpacks were conceived before the acquisition but launched after. The teams were allowed to continue executing on roadmaps for multiple years after the acquisition, but Salesforce could be viewed more like a series b, c, d round than in a way influencing the roadmap and making it happen.

GitHub is an amazing parallel, folks feel that Microsoft turned around GitHub, but actions and much of the GitHub turn around happened long before the acquisition. Those sort of things take years, you should mostly try to judge a top down influence 4-6 years after they were there.

> [Github A]ctions and much of the GitHub turn around happened long before the acquisition

Interesting - someone at either MS or Github told me that the Azure DevOps team moved over to GitHub to create Actions. But maybe I misheard or both versions are true.

Yeah, not sure how much I can say, but this is definitely a repainting of reality. Actions at least the vision of what it would/could be was before acquisition.

As an early adopter of actions I remember that it was wildly different in its first version (beta perhaps?) than it is today. I have no source to back this up because it was too long ago, but I feel like I remember hearing at the time that the reason it changed so much was _in part_ because of the ADO presence. So I think you're right that the vision was there before hand, but what we have today is very much because of the influence of ADO (in particular, the mandate to run actions _on_ Azure, IIRC).

Here's what I think the two potential scenarios you map out are:

- That Jason Warner, Max Schoening, and a brains trust of Heroku Product & Design leadership jumped ship to GitHub. After they got there they continue their run of product success and innovation and launch the next platform innovation for GitHub. Which also just happens to be yet another way to run code as a service.

- The ADO team join GitHub, and then pivot into a whole new and foreign area.

People can make their own judgements on which of these is the most likely option.

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