Title: When Heroku Was Still a Thing

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October 17, 2011. The day Steve Jobs passed away. The news hit hard, and it was all I could think about as I sat down to write this post. It’s funny how these events can linger in your mind, sometimes more than the mundane tech issues you face every day.

I was working at Heroku by that point, which had just been acquired by Salesforce. A lot of us felt a sense of betrayal when it happened because Heroku’s founders were known for their passion and vision, not to mention their culture of transparency. The acquisition seemed to change everything, but then again, the industry was still in flux.

Around this time, I was deep into some ops work trying to debug an issue with our database infrastructure. We had just upgraded from Postgres 8.x to 9.x, and things were not going smoothly. Some of our applications started throwing errors about serialization failures, which turned out to be a known bug in the upgrade process.

I spent hours combing through logs and running queries trying to figure it out. I was using tools like pg_dump and psql to troubleshoot, but the real gem that helped me was the Heroku PostgreSQL documentation, which had been meticulously maintained by our engineering team. This incident taught me how critical good documentation is in any tech stack.

It wasn’t just about fixing bugs though; I found myself arguing with other engineers about best practices around database replication and failover strategies. The industry buzz at that time was all about NoSQL solutions like MongoDB and Cassandra, but we were still heavily invested in PostgreSQL. Some of the arguments felt silly now—like debating whether to use a hammer or a screwdriver—but they were real and heated.

Then there were the debates around continuous delivery and DevOps practices. We had just started using Jenkins for CI/CD pipelines, and it was a challenge to get everyone on board with version control best practices. It was like trying to convince people that you could actually build software without constantly breaking things in production. But slowly, we began to see the benefits of automation and testing.

Around this time, Netflix announced its Chaos Monkey project, which was a game-changer for our team. We started looking at ways to introduce failure into our systems to ensure they were resilient. It’s funny how much I learned from that—basically, if your system can handle unexpected events, it will survive just about anything.

The launch of OpenStack also had us scratching our heads about cloud infrastructure. The thought of running our own private clouds seemed like a daunting task, but the promise was there to build something highly customized and efficient. However, we ultimately decided that sticking with Heroku made sense for us given its managed nature and ease of use.

Looking back, October 2011 felt like the start of a major transition period in the tech industry. The death of Steve Jobs marked a shift not just at Apple, but across all technology companies. Heroku was changing hands, DevOps practices were gaining traction, and we were grappling with new technologies every day.

In the end, it’s the small, personal battles that stick out: fixing bugs, debating best practices, and trying to make sense of the chaos. These are the moments that define your growth as a tech professional, even if they don’t always seem significant at the time.