The story of Heroku (Interview)

This week on The Changelog we’re joined by Adam Wiggins, co-founder and former CTO of Heroku, for an exclusive trip down Heroku memory lane. Adam and Jerod are both tremendous fans of Heroku and believe (to this day) they represent the apex in developer experience for delivering code to production.

We talk through the beginnings of Heroku, the v1 most people have forgotten about, the era of web hosting back in 2008-2010, the serendipity of Silicon Vally in those days, pitching to Y Combinator, the makings of git push heroku, the Heroku style and name, the sale of Heroku to Salesforce, potential regrets — and we tee up part 2 coming next week with Adam going beyond Heroku and the story of Muse.

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Featuring:

• Adam Wiggins – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Heroku.com
• Heroku Lifts Ruby on Rails Development into the Cloud
• Post-exit: What on earth is Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins doing in Europe? (spoiler: not vacationing)
• My journey into the Berlin startup scene
• Heroku on Crunchbase
• Adam Wiggins’ Heroku values
• End of a chapter: My Heroku departure message
• Making computers better
• The Twelve-factor App

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!