alexmorse

I've used Heroku off and on over the past couple years. I am not a fan, but it definitely has some good uses. Getting off the ground for free is nice.

Uptime was ok. I only remember one serious outage, but that was due to EC2.

The support is absolutely terrible. On the free tier you get a somewhat canned response (not a solution, just a response) the next day. The more you pay, the more support is prioritized in response time, it's still not good. When asked what it took to get great support I was told that's an additional $2000/month and would give access to a technical account manager. That was most of a year ago, so may have changed.

As far as page speeds and high traffic, that is very dependent on what you're doing. I was never satisfied with performance or latency building web apps on the platform. If your app is heavily client side, and server requests can be high latency it could work very well.

I really can't recommend them for anything outside of proof of concept, or small non-critical sites. I currently use Heroku for this.

Doesn't seem to work. I get a created_at time, but no started_at in the resulting json blob for job status.

Type code on it, productively.

Seriously though, where do you feel it's failing compared to other keyboards? As far as laptop keyboards go, it's one of the best I've used.

This is what I've been looking for since the iPad came out. Your brushes aren't as good as Paper, but the zoom feature is killer and makes the iPad a real drawing tool for the first time.

I'm looking forward to the collected essays "Somewhat verbatim guide on how not to run a company."

I worked closely with 3 studios, pretty closely with maybe 5 total. A studio tends to be about 50 people, maybe as big as a hundred.

In those, there were many people that liked their job. By job I mean, the challenges, the scale, and environment. I only met a handful that were jazzed up about the game they were working on... and that was usually the most heartbreaking, because they just never had an opportunity to change things for the better as far as game design, or the art. There are two specific people I know as exceptions, that are tenacious as hell, and made concessions only when absolutely necessary. Total respect for them, but they're still pretty beaten down and discouraged.

Intermittently, a lot of people got excited about games. Overall a lot of people derided the games they were making, a lot of the time.

Ex-zyngite here.

To your questions above, my opinions. I'm no expert, just have some experience there.

1) The massive staff is due to massive success initially, then massive management mistakes continually, from the top down the chain. That's not to say there aren't great people fighting the good fight; There are many intelligent and capable people, but there's also a great deal misalignment of interests throughout the organization.

2) I think most of the games are pretty lame as well. I don't understand why Zynga customers pay for the games in most cases, but they do. Millions of them do. Zynga is very good at catering to their audience and giving them what they want but...

2.5) Typically what happens is a studio will operate trying to make the most profit in the shortest time, burning out its users with cheap grabs because that's what the higher ups demand. A lot of people in the trenches love games, and want to make great games, but get mired in the moment and vague demands from on high.

I don't think social games are a fundamentally flawed model. Some of Zynga's own games had massive retention and monetization per user, but didn't scale. I think it's an equation no one has fully down yet.

A friend of mine built a pretty good tool for this sort of research and sharing long ago if any of you are interested:

http://salaryscout.com/