I don't think protesting these companies is a good long term solution. We need a protect DNS act or anti-censorship bill. Big tech has more money and power than hollywood. They should lobby more aggressively.
From casual observation they have a few strong opinions which seem to be based on their experiences and requirements up to that point but which change when their requirements change.
I've no issue with that - as your knowledge changes your opinions should be open to change. You could knock them for having strident opinions they later modify but I'd rather be grateful that they are willing to share and learn publicly as that way everyone has the chance to learn with them.
I agree. I'm a 37s fanboy. Web tech has made a quantum leap in the last year. The difference between rails 3.1 and rails 2.8 is huge. Not to mention html5, css3 and new javascript libraries such as backbone-js. These are game changers. Adapting them means a rewrite.
DHH's Twitter suggests otherwise. He talks about the joy of starting from scratch developing with rails/master. Can't link to it because I'm on a phone.
Happy to see that Salesforce is releasing its own apps on Heroku. It shows they are serious about using the platform as it is, instead of turning it into something enterprisey.
I really enjoyed reading this. Especially the section about bravery, "the opposite of fear is initiative not courage". Well said. I'm leaving today for a big wall climbing trip and trying to prepare myself mentally for the intense fear that I feel high on the wall. Sometimes that fear will shut me down and I stop climbing even though I'm safe. When this happens I have to keep moving and keep making decisions.
Would you mind giving some income information? Like a rough approximate or something? The viability of this strategy is something I'm very interested in.
It all depends on the number of users and the nature of your app. Typically 1-2% of users buy virtual goods, and eCPM from ads is pretty decent for US/Aus/EU/Ca audience. Aim for an addictive experience and the users will come.
Amazing. Way back in 2007 I taught myself how to code by making small Facebook apps. I started out by editing live PHP files on a shared server from A Small Orange ($3.33 a month!). After a few months I a few apps with traffic around 30k DAU. A Small Orange would automatically shutdown the apps every couple hours. I'd email them and complain about their shoddy hosting service. They'd always respond instantly apologizing and putting the apps back online. After a couple weeks I realized that I had a scaling problem and began learning how to setup a dedicated server. Over the next two years I spent about 80% of my time wrestling with hardware, setting up load balancers, configuring cache and db servers, and other operational nightmares. I had little time or energy to work on improving my apps or building new products.
Then I discovered Heroku. I would have done anything to have this when I started out. The platform teaches (forces) you how to build a scalable architecture. You can try out new ideas for apps for essentially nothing (1 dyno is zero dollars). Since moving to Heroku I spend about 5% of my time working ops. The craziest thing is I've actually saved money since switching from dedicated hardware to Heroku. I was really bad at configuring servers and the stuff I built was inefficient and expensive. Heroku's cloud stacks are optimized better than my old hardware environment.
Heroku's architecture is great for wild traffic swings common with Facebook apps. Well except for their database services. They don't seem reliable or scalable. I prefer RDS.
In sum, Facebook and Heroku is a great starting place for learning to build web apps. I would have done anything to have this tech four yeas ago.
I'll jump in here, since you asked. Bad timing. About 2 hours ago we started getting these completely abstract errors 15 minutes before we were due to present to some VC folks:
I have absolutely no indication what part of our stack is having trouble. After much freaking out, we spun up an entirely new app and demoed with the seed data. This weird sort of stuff has been happening to us at an alarming rate over the last 3 months or so. Not being able to deploy, having to put in a ticket, and waiting 24 hours for a someone in support to fix it is another example.
Please don't take this the wrong way: I love you guys as people. I pushed for Heroku adoption at our shop. I absolutely love the concept of Heroku. Until a few months I felt like you guys were doing it way better than anyone else. (Left EngineYard to migrate everything to Heroku.) But these past few months have been really scary. There is a growing consensus at the office that we'll end up migrating away from Heroku to a platform where we can actually understand what's going on and be responsible for what's going on under the hood. After I began using Heroku, I never thought I'd want to go back to that again.
EDIT: Provided a more clear example that is less obviously suspect of a timeout.
Did you try contacting support? Looking at that log line, I can tell you that it looks like your app took too long to respond to the request (service=30000ms) and our routing mesh timed it out (status=503, Error H12 (Request timeout).
If there's anything we can help with, definitely get in touch. Our support team is top notch.
You're right, the support team is very friendly and supportive. But my resolution times for recent issues have been 24-hour turnarounds, even when we were feeling some level of pain and labeled it "high". In this instance, which was definitely an "urgent", I just didn't have any confidence the issue would be resolved in time. Thankfully when we've had issues like this (mostly with development/staging environments) it's always easy enough to just spin up another app. But that doesn't make me very comfortable having my production stuff there.
Are you on the shared hosting DB plan? Are you using more than 1 dyno?
We are running 4 dynos, 2 workers, and the Ronin DB plan and we haven't had any problems other than a 10 minute downtime due to a bad deploy by Heroku.
Just eyeballing it we have about 40-50 apps using the shared DB. We don't have any dedicated DB stuff with Heroku, but we use varying dynos levels. (Most apps idle at 1, though.)
Probably that the cheap plans are on shared DBs and it's very expensive to use dedicated DBs and the dedicated boxes appear to be single instances of Postgres.
I'm not complaining, but what is the official Heroku approach to things like DB sharding, etc.
It supports scaling vertically by throwing in more cache, faster CPU, etc. Once you outgrow that, it supports horizontal scaling by replicating to read-only slaves.
I'm aware as we are running on heroku here, but it gets expensive quick and your options are more limited than if you roll your own. Then again, that goes for the whole platform.
If you have any ticket links or more information about your problems please let us know, inexplicably slow should never happen, especially with a dedicated db.
I'd say that the biggest issue and the only issue I have with heroku is that when you guys have done some releases, you would prevent apps that have been placed into maintenance mode during the release from being taken out of maintenance mode.
This becomes a problem when the maintainers of the app in question are not aware of your release schedule. The solution, it seems, would be to either a) do a better job of communicating downtime; b) do rolling deployments and failover so that apps may continue to function; c) a bit of both.
While our app is not important enough for the above to bother us a great deal, we do have paying customers. As soon as one of them comes knocking telling us that we screwed up, and in reality it wasn't fully our fault, we will be a bit more adamant about the above suggestions :)
This is excellent! We are on a heroku stack at bizeebee.com now, and if we had to write a facebook app now, there's no question that we'd use this. I had written some apps right after fb platform was released and had to go through hoops to set up my own dev/production environments, manage configurations, deployments, source control etc.
Heroku had taken care of all of that for non-fb apps, and now with tight fb integration, I might just write a few quick fb apps again!
I should amend what I said below with a disclaimer: as long as Amazon AWS doesn't go down, and as long as heroku maintains its progress on ensuring the uptime of their cloud solution... :)
Last night I visited my uncle, a 50 year old rancher in Eastern Colorado. He wanted to show me videos of him calf-roping with a rodeo celebrity. I was very surprised when he brought out a Samsung Galaxy Tablet. This man is extremely computer illiterate and prides himself on ignoring modern technology. But wow did he love that tablet. He used it for everything (doesn't own a computer).
This incident convinced me that non-iPad tablets have a fighting chance. I'd like to see this exercise done again in one year. I believe non-iPads will gain more traction.
Y'all don't know my struggle
Y'all can't match my hustle
You can't catch my hustle
You can't fathom my love dude
Lock yourself in a room doin' five beats a day for three summers
That's a different world like Kree Summers
I deserve to do these numbers
- Kanye West, Spaceship
Back in the day, I had a Facebook app called Quiz Monster that was utilized by lots of people all over the world. The app had international appeal because quizzes could be written in any language. For fun I coded an internal translation app heavily inspired by Facebook translations. I would type in an English phrase, select a target language. Then user's of that target language would see a dialog box asking "Do you speak english?" If they clicked yes they would be asked to translate the english phrase into their native language. After 25 submissions the program would stop prompting users. This usually took less than 5 seconds. The end result was a list of 25 translations of said phrase. I found the submissions far more reliable than Google Translate and used them to translate my app into many many languages.
I don't see what you are trying to say.
Google translate is a machine translator, it could be less accurate, but it scales very well. It is probably translating millions of pages per day. You are comparing a system to generate voluntary translators for your quiz application to Google translate, these things are very different and technology wise Google translate is a few orders of magnitude more complex.
