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Fly.io: The reclaimer of Heroku's magic

(christine.website)
528 points sealeck | 4 comments | 15 May 22 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.005s | source
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hthrowaway5 ◴[15 May 22 22:39 UTC] No.31391849[source]▶
At one point (a very long time ago now) it was declared that Dogwood was the future and as a result Go would be the language of choice at Heroku and Erlang would be no more.

Trouble is that Erlang ran all the important Cedar code (it might still today) and the Erlang engineers didn't particularly like the news that Erlang code was essentially deprecated so they left and nobody knew how to maintain the stack. This definitely wasn't the only problem we had but it was a big one.

What do fellow Herokai think? Was Dogwood a fool's errand? Or did we just not get enough staff to build it properly?

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1. makeitdouble ◴[16 May 22 03:46 UTC] No.31393484[source]▶
Have seen similar transitions in different companies, and while I can't say anything about Heroku, it is often not the target technology or architecture that matters.

For instance I've seen PHP -> nodejs transition while moving to micrservices, and while the ideas made sense on paper:

- It didn't come from the engineers at large. Most weren't phased by the prospect and the main engine for the change was the top architects and the engineering management.

- target architecture and language were very popular, and easy to hire. Incidentally salaries would be cheaper for same level of experience engineers.

Predictidbly a ton of the existing engineers left and new blood came in, and it was mostly according to plan from what I gathered. Some of the "old folks" stayed at a premium once they were the only ones left with enough knowledge, but they got relagated in side "experts" roles and the product as a whole saw a big change in philosophy (I think mentally what was seen as the "core" also became "legacy" in everyone's mind as engineers moved away)

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2. rr808 ◴[16 May 22 04:14 UTC] No.31393623[source]▶
This is pretty common in corporates too. Shiny new project gets all the attention, funding and management focus. The poor guys left to deal with the day to day crap get screwed over then leave. If they leave too soon its an emergency, if they stay too long they get laid off.
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3. WJW ◴[16 May 22 07:54 UTC] No.31394525[source]▶
Oh for sure. The last company I worked at did a similar thing and decreed that all Ruby projects would be maintenance-only and all new projects were to be in Golang, despite there being a single golang dev in the entire company (who did not even work in the backend dev team but rather in a "platform" team). Within five months all the Ruby devs had left, so despite not a single Golang project being released yet the company now had nobody who knew how the current system works. Several large outages ensued.
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4. john_the_writer ◴[18 May 22 22:59 UTC] No.31428674{3}[source]▶
Yeah.. I'm seeing the same thing where I work. Moving from ruby/rails to elixir. No outages, but dev speed is at a crawl. All the legacy stuff just gets ugly patches.

There was zero need to switch because even though elixir/BEAM allows for a pile of processes, postgres does not.

If I had to guess, the switch was made because someone saw something shiny.