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.
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.
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.
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 Its true their docs got out of date, but i found their response "we'll help you design your apps properly for the 21st century" reasonable, even though they got slammed for it.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
