Heroku COO on RapGenius, legendary hires, and developers’ woman problem

I live in Silicon Beach in LA. I've architected two very successful startups in .NET. I have written .NET for sites making 100's of millions like Hulu, Ticketmaster, Fandango.

I wake up in the morning thinking about software and fall asleep thinking about software. I take my craft very seriously. I am not some aberration in the .NET world, as I've worked with hundreds of guys like myself.

Sounds like you don't have a whole lot of respect for the .NET community. I've just lost a little bit more respect for Heroku.

And I wouldn't call documentation that indicates a core piece of infrastructure works one way but then functions an entirely different way as a "mis-communication". That sort of CEO-speak is simply meant to minimize the situation to make any further discussion around it look petty.

Respect, indeed.

And the reporter bought it.

I think he's a bit too touchy-feely and not enough make-it-worky.

Sure, developer success is important, but the issue is with server performance and efficiency. I would rather they address their problems head-on. Perhaps I'd prefer that approach for every company and every problem.

Certain aspects of Heroku, and especially some of the people who work there, are excellent. However, it seems like there are chronic systemic problems with how the organization monitors/checks quality.

[0] https://twitter.com/jtaylor/status/307261409262202880

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/15087542/293064

edit: added a missing comma

>"Ultimately, our stances always come from a place of respect. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all."

>"I think it’s great when someone provides feedback , positive or negative, but we need to do it in a respectful way. When these things come up — and they will always come up — just treat everyone involved with respect."

>Two years ago, he told me, the word “respect” wasn’t on that list. Today, it defines how Heroku will respond to RapGenius and the rest of its customers.

What? This guy sounds like a politician.

If you accidentally (or deliberately) hide the way a major part of your product works and it just so happens that this means that to get a certain performance from your product, your customers will have to pay a lot more than they think, do not give an interview talking about "respect" (shouldn't that be a given!?), apologise and tell us how you are going to fix it.

What they probably should have said is that at some point if you are running too much stuff on Heroku, you probably should be running your own servers tuned to your own very specific workloads. Of course, that would sort of violate the whole premise of a PAAS in the cloud that can scale to infinity, but the point remains.

If you are paying $10,000+ a month, that buys you a lot of server time elsewhere that would probably be tuned better for current workloads or maybe Heroku needs to offer more turning options.

Either way, it feels an awful lot like Heroku has punted every time they had a chance to run with the ball on this and that's pretty disappointing.