I learned web development through "Ruby on Rails Tutorial" by Michael Hartl. The book is a project-based tutorial where you create a Twitter clone complete with a basic authentication system.
The book had you host your app on the free version of Heroku. I imagine this book has taught a lot of people, and influenced a lot of people to use Heroku.
We've been using it to teach new Rails developers at our workplace, where we have a "hire the best engineer available" policy even if they have no Rails experience. You can just skip the Heroku bits.
Of course, knowing Hartl, he'll also soon update the book accordingly.
And, it's a shame that Heroku is no longer an option for brand new developers who won't know that painless deploy-to-web. I know there are alternatives but I'm not familiar with them.
Interviewed, was given a take home project to complete, and went straight to borders and bought the book. Went through the book in a couple days then completed the project and ended up getting the job.
I essentially earned a college degree’s worth of languages/frameworks (Ruby, Node ecosystems) on free Heroku instances, and I owe my career to it. Other comments speak to this point as well. There’s probably a generation of us who completed some blog/O’Reilly “curriculum” involving Heroku > Digital Ocean > AWS > etc.
I never paid Heroku a dime and, after everything has shaken out, I don’t know why I would start now.
> I never paid Heroku a dime and, after everything has shaken out, I don’t know why I would start now.
Well, that's the problem, isn't it?
They provided a valuable service to lots of people on their own dime, and saw no reward for it. Now they've been bought by a large player who, presumably, wants their infra and expertise.
There are plenty of cool alternatives but one I’ve used and don’t see mentioned here is Dokku, which was trivial for me to set up on, in my case, a cheap droplet on DigitalOcean.
Same, been running 4 rails apps on a $40 per month droplet.
Works really well for small projects. One of which has gained traction and I’m about to migrate off. Not that I have any issues that I need to migrate away for, but it seems sensible to have it on its own infra / isolated environment if we’re going to be working on it more seriously.
I haven't seen anything to indicate there will be anything cheaper than $7. But if you need a data store, and who doesn't with a service that uses Heroku, I think you'll have to pay for that as well. For example, the cheapest Postgres instance is $9/month.
They are switching to an enterprise-oriented model, which means they'll nickel-and-dime you for everything. If you can't afford a few hundreds on basic infra, you really should look elsewhere.
Readit News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32594533
Dead Comment
The book had you host your app on the free version of Heroku. I imagine this book has taught a lot of people, and influenced a lot of people to use Heroku.
Not anymore I guess.
We've been using it to teach new Rails developers at our workplace, where we have a "hire the best engineer available" policy even if they have no Rails experience. You can just skip the Heroku bits.
Of course, knowing Hartl, he'll also soon update the book accordingly.
And, it's a shame that Heroku is no longer an option for brand new developers who won't know that painless deploy-to-web. I know there are alternatives but I'm not familiar with them.
Interviewed, was given a take home project to complete, and went straight to borders and bought the book. Went through the book in a couple days then completed the project and ended up getting the job.
I never paid Heroku a dime and, after everything has shaken out, I don’t know why I would start now.
Well, that's the problem, isn't it?
They provided a valuable service to lots of people on their own dime, and saw no reward for it. Now they've been bought by a large player who, presumably, wants their infra and expertise.
That doesn't necessarily follow. Good will towards developers goes a long way. It helps build reputations and encourages referrals.
https://dokku.com/
Works really well for small projects. One of which has gained traction and I’m about to migrate off. Not that I have any issues that I need to migrate away for, but it seems sensible to have it on its own infra / isolated environment if we’re going to be working on it more seriously.
I wish that things were better such that we could have nice things.