
Heroku | the Ruby on Rails Podcast - luccastera
http://podcast.rubyonrails.org/programs/1/episodes/heroku
======
tx
Heroku is the weirdest company I've seen. Everything started rather typically
for a YC-backed group: an announcement of beta on YC news, immediate if not
mandatory post on techcrunch, hundreds of enthusiastic comments. Cool.

Except this time I feel like I am alone in my feeling that the service is
completely useless. Tell me, how is this better than my regular "offline" dev
tools? How can browser-based JS-IDE even approach a productivity of NetBeans
or my beloved Vim? Who told you that having a Rails stack on your own machine
is hard? Who told you that deploying your existing (already developed) Rails
app is hard? Why would I want Heroku?

I do remember that question, on YC application very well: _"What is the
problem you are trying to solve? What are your users forced to do now?"_. I am
a typical user of Heroku, and I don't have any problems that need solutions
like this. I am not forced to do anyting unpleasant. My life is awesome
without Heroku. But I feel soooo dumb because of "not getting it".

Damn...

~~~
hbien
In terms of development, maybe it's not better than what you have on the
desktop. If you're really productive in your environment (terminal + vim OR
IDE), then it definitely doesn't make sense to develop on their JS editor.

But in terms of hosting, it's a lot cheaper to host your Rails app using
Heroku than getting a VPS. Both money-wise and time-wise.

I only listened a few minutes into the podcast, but I think one of the
founders mentioned that at its current state Heroku is great for people who
want to make apps for their friends, like 1-20 people. But these developers
don't want to buy a VPS plan and manage the application themselves.

Their future goal is probably to get hosting for apps with 1000+ users, so
they can make some money.

But you're right, for developing an app, I'll probably stick to the desktop.
Maybe one day Heroku will get so slick that we can do all development straight
from the browser and hit "Publish", like Weebly.

