Adam Wiggins Leaving Heroku | Hacker News Reader

Adam Wiggins Leaving Heroku

gist.github.com

124 pointsgoronbjorn33 comments

During the whole Rap Genius fallout, I posted here a few times about the things I was bothered with on Heroku based on my own experiences running a large >100 dyno setup in production. Adam reached out privately and invited me to the offices for a free lunch and discussion about the issues I was having. He was super nice and I gained a huge amount of respect for the way he dealt with things himself. I wish him the best of luck in whatever he does next. Funny enough, I'm now working on the team that is creating CloudFoundry and seeing just how hard it is to build something like Heroku.

Nice post, thanks.

So maybe I'll start making a FAQ for everything.

Q. Who is this Adam Wiggins guy?

A. http://about.adamwiggins.com/

Q. Why did you leave Heroku?

A. It was time to move on. I'm proud of Heroku and everything I've done in the last six years. But like any other entrepreneur (or human being), sooner or later it's time to do the next thing.

Q. What's the next thing?

A. Vacation, travel, time with friends & family. Tinkering with new technologies.

Q. Are you going to start a new startup?

A. Almost certainly. But not in the immediate future.

Q. Is Heroku awesome?

A. Obviously. I'd like to thank YC/PG; all our investors (Redpoint, Baseline, Ignition, &c); everyone who's ever been a Heroku employee; Salesforce.com; the authors of Ruby, Rails, Ubuntu, and Git; and my mom.

Here's Adam Wiggin's Heroku values list as part of his parting Heroku - https://gist.github.com/adamwiggins/5687294

That is great. I keep an Evernote notebook on inspiring business ideas and material, where I just stashed his values list.

There are some absolute gems in this.

Leaving for where? Departure posts without "what's next" feel like a cliffhanger.

Edit: I was able to find https://twitter.com/hirodusk/status/340573647813083136 which says "My near future involves a lot of r&r, but I'm definitely not done building things. :)"

> Leaving for where? Departure posts without "what's next" feel like a cliffhanger.

People had the same complaint when I left reddit. :)

Sometimes it's just more fun to see where the winds take you.

I hold an unreasonable hope that he'll create Blood Dusk II :).

ok, since another attempt was sidelined for being anon, and it's the obvious question, i'll ask:

is this related to the rap genius mess?

I would actually guess that the timing is mostly driven by the vesting schedule from the Salesforce acquisition. They announced the acquisition in December 2010, and it closed fairly quickly thereafter. I think 2 years is a standard vesting period after an acquisition, so now is a good time to leave unless he wants to make a career of it at Salesforce.

You see stories all the time like "Founder X leaves ____ 2 years after acquisition by ____." There's one just from today about a Tweetdeck founder: http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/31/iain-dodsworth-leaves-twitt... .

I found the whole rap genius thing overblown. The idea that a single request should block a server until it returns is absurd, given that it probably is spending most of its time waiting on io. If you really need to load balance CPU bound tasks you should do it properly with a work queue rather than expecting your reverse proxy to do it. Its true their docs got out of date, but i found their response "we'll help you design your apps properly for the 21st century" reasonable, even though they got slammed for it.

> but none seem to capture the enormity of what's transpired these past six years.

I always knew they were a wicked, wicked company :)

Who is Adam Wiggins, a man the OP assumes we all know and who needs no introduction?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Adam+wiggins

Can you come back when you have something useful to say ?

Thanks for the help with that.

Apparently he doesn't even have a Wikipedia page.

His own website says "I'm a hacker, entrepeneur, anarcho-crypto-geek, and drug policy reformer. I'm a cofounder of Heroku and a board member at the Marijuana Policy Project. In the past I've made video games, electronic music, and Burning Man art installations. I like Norse mythology and things that glow."

The only thing that stands out I guess is "cofounder of Heroku", but that's not very informative. Was he someone of special import at Heroku... will the service die without him?

So... right back at you. Can you come back when you have something useful to say?

Fall out from the Rap Genius/routing debacle?

Why have people downvoted this? The linked statement doesn't give any background on why he's leaving so it's not an unreasonable question.

I downvoted it because it was needless speculation by an anonymous account called "routergate" which was created 35 minutes ago for the purpose of stirring the pot.

Exactly right. If you want to say something snark then human-up and say it, don't try to hide behind a throwaway account.

Losing karma on HN means losing certain abilities though.

And if you happened to put your real name on your profile then you absolutely cannot mention anything like that.

I've never had any problem making critical comments about Heroku's load balancing design under my real name. I honestly don't know what you paranoid people are on about.

I don't understand. Why can't you mention Rap Genius's problems with Heroku routing if your name is attached to your account?

Starting rumors about someone's termination/resignation is never good for your professional reputation.

Then, don't do it?

If you are anonymous why not?

This is the elephant in the room that everyone wants to know.

I doubt this story would even have made the front page of HN without the outing by Rap Genius.

Thanks, that does make sense.

It doesn't read like he was fired or quit in disgust, so what's a hypothesis that could explain the connection?

So you believe what you read? This post gives exactly zero insights about his leaving reasons. The stuff about the nice team is just normal happyspeak, he could be completely pissed off he would have written the same exact words.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)#Concern_trol...

Is this a troll too? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5801991 Or is it only a 'troll' if someone of 'ill repute' (aka anonymous account) says it?

calling someone a troll is basically bullying: it's using a label to shut someone up, implicitly identifying with the majority ("you're not one of us; you're not normal; hence you're wrong").

the way to deal with this kind of bullying is to call them out on it. show that what you are is normal. hence my post. because bullies aren't going to attack someone who has status and confidence, who shows that the behaviour they were criticising is reasonable.

sure, some trolls are simply wrong. but if they're wrong you can show that. there was nothing wrong here. just a bunch of cowards who saw a chance to bash someone else in the name of being offended (and i suspect, depressingly, with the hope that the person they were being offended for would recognise and reward them - because famous entrepreneur on hn. eugh).

I would say no, but the routergate comment could be a case of sockpuppetry, which I would personally classify as a type of trolling.

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