I’ve used Heroku since before I’ve been a professional software engineer.
As part of my bootcamp, we learned to write code first, and abstracted ops away with Heroku’s super powerful git CLI integration (git push heroku master). My first job as a software engineer deployed all of their applications via Heroku – to a paid tier, of course. That job also leveraged review applications for one-click staging environment creation, environment configuration, and creating a seeded staging database, which was a very powerful feature for passing our work off to QA engineers. And finally, I still use it from time to time to spin up simple one-off websites, like a demo for hyde-lang, a language I wrote in Python. Or a demo for a chess engine called ChessMate that I wrote when I was still in bootcamp. Most recently, it powered the microblogging API for this very blog.
I will link directly to those Heroku apps below, but I’m not sure they’ll exist in the future.
Heroku announced pricing changes last week and disclosed that free tier applications will start to be removed if inactive in late October and completely shut down starting in late November.
I love(d) Heroku, but it’s time to say goodbye. The applications that I previously ran are not worth spending actual cash on, unfortunately, so I will let them expire in November. If you’re reading this post, it also means that I’ve removed the microblogging functionality that I detailed a few months ago. It never got any visits and was more of a toy than anything, but I’d be lying if I said that being a casualty of this Heroku change didn’t sting a little.
Demo apps:
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!