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I’ve been learning to live in the present tense.

Not in the way productivity articles mean it. Not optimized presence or mindfulness as performance. The slower, less glamorous version. The one where you sit with the actual texture of your days and notice what’s there.

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Today, Heroku announced it is transitioning to a “sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support.” Enterprise contracts will no longer be offered to new customers. The stated reason: Salesforce is redirecting engineering investment toward enterprise AI.

If you’ve followed my writing, you know I spent over a decade at Heroku. I helped build the sales engineering function, created the Architect Exam, onboarded some of the platform’s largest customers, and eventually became the Product Manager for Heroku Data. I left in 2022, and I’ve written several times about the platform’s evolution since. Today’s news is, in some ways, the chapter I hoped wouldn’t come. But it’s not the chapter I didn’t expect.

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It increasingly feels like we are walking a tightrope stretched between ancient wisdom and algorithmic chaos, the ground beneath us less stable than we’d like to admit.

Socrates believed that no one does evil willingly. Evil, in his view, stems from ignorance - if people truly understood what was good, they would choose it. The implication is hopeful: educate people, cultivate their intelligence, and you inoculate them against evil.

It’s a comforting thought. It’s also empirically testable.

I recently found myself in a conversation exploring whether this premise holds water. What I found was more troubling - and more interesting - than I expected.

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The two classes in college that had the most impact on 20-something me were the two semesters of Creative Writing: Poetry and the two semesters I took of The History of Black Music. Yes, I took them over the same two semesters. Poetry opened my mind to how language can be used and abused to convey emotion, and the History of Black Music showed me how oppressed communities used music and poetry to celebrate and record history.

It also opened my eyes to the untaught history of the United States, and broader the Western European civilization. It led me to meeting and learning about our first peoples in the Americas, their struggles and lived experiences.

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I have been around online communities far longer then I’d like to admit. And I have lived through many waves of community building, discovery and colonization. One of the problems that I have seen happen over and over is a form of gentrification of online communities.

I do not feel that an online community being gentrified is the same as a physical community suffering this fate. I do feel that there are lessons and observations that we can take from both sides of the experience. I also feel that we are seeing this same thing happening again in the Fediverse.

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I am sure that you have heard the news about twitter.

I had spent a lot of time building a heavily curated experience on twitter. Over the years, I have carefully selected follows to build a news stream that appeared to reflect reality.

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As we make things more complex, do we make things better? Are we lowering the bar to entry or raising it?

When I was a kid, the BBS scene was the way that most of us got into computers. That required a lot. I was very privileged to have a C64 hooked up to a 300 baud modem when I was a pre-teen.

How do folks break into the market today? How do they pick up the skills that they need? How can we ensure that everyone has a chance to explore?

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Well, if you have not seen it yet, Heroku is removing its free tier on November 28nd, 2022.

If you use the free tier, you need to decide if you want to upgrade or move. And don’t forget to grab SQL dumps of your hobby Postgres!

I thought that I would take a moment to reflect on the journey of Free at Heroku, and exercise some other hosting platforms.

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At about 7:45am March 26th 2011, I walked up to the doors at Heroku for the first time. I was early because that’s what you did where I came from.

The doors were locked. No one responded to the buzzer.

So I went and got some really bad coffee at the DNA Lounge next door, and waited. As I recall, I saw someone walk in at about 9, and followed them in. That’s how the next chapter in my life started.

I have been involved in and with various infrastructure as a service and platform as a service providers for well over 12 years now. Often I am asked to explain “why use a IaaS provider?” or “why use a PaaS?” or “Why use Heroku?”.

I started working 100% remote in early 2008. Over the years I have learned quite a few lessons, and have really come to appreciate the lifestyle.

I was traveling for pleasure a few weeks ago, and I got into an interesting discussion with one of the people responsible for the experience we had on the trip. He posited that the most important thing a brand could do was to standardize the experience across all of their touch points.

I’ve watched Doctor Who since I was a kid and it was on PBS in the US. I’ve introduced my kids to the fandom, and I’ve kept up with the modern incarnations of the show and its spin-offs.

In the mid 2000’s a bookseller accidentally changed the world. Yes, that bookseller was Amazon, and the change was the introduction of a IaaS. Quite possibly the first Infrastructure as a Service. At least the first commercially viable IaaS.

Just a disclaimer - I am a Buddhist, so I tend to frame my thinking in Buddhist language. However I am not a religious Buddhist. The only reason that I identify as Buddhist is that the philosophies put forward by the Buddha resound with me, as do the ways that they are presented.