lol nothing yet!

😂

Who is doing really great in-app contextual help?

I want...

- Contextual: If I'm confused about a UI element, the help is right there.
- Non-intrusive: When I don't need the help, it doesn't clutter the UI.
- Obvious: I don't have to dig for it

Not sure how to balance the last two.

Heroku is doubling down on the "sustaining engineering" language and it really bothers me.

For most devs, "sustaining engineering" == "maintenance mode"

If they don't want customers to think they're in maintenance mode, they need clearer language.

Heroku: What’s Next

What's happening at Heroku, and what does it mean for your team?

judoscale.com/blog/heroku...

Gotcha... I feel like "staging" is a misleading name there, but I think it's a good workflow.

Disposable review/preview apps (for pull requests) are good for that, but I can see how for some teams that's not enough.

How common is it these days for teams to have a staging environment, versus auto-deploying main to prod?

What I don't like: Env vars require a code change. And for secrets, I actually had to *destroy* my machines after I unset a couple.

Heroku might be the only platform where you can change an env var and it just restarts. Just works, and fast.

Easy to overlook until you don't have it.

Thoughts on env vars as I spend some time with Fly...

I actually like that Fly separates env vars and secrets as distinct concepts. Confused me at first, but it makes sense. Secrets get extra protection, env vars are for config. Good semantic separation.

I love how Northflank's pricing page lets you choose the timeframe for the metered pricing.

All metered pricing should have this.

Super helpful, thanks!!

I just updated our PaaS Pricing Comparison Calculator:

- Added Amazon ECS Fargate
- Updated pricing for Railway
- Factored CPU time-slicing for Fly shared machines

Heroku still stands out as the most expensive, but the others are very competitive!

Can you expand a bit on "compliance"? That's not something I've had to deal with personally. Not sure what to look for.

Idea: The Judoscale Platform Tour...

We deploy our 3,000+ RPS Rails app across each of the fully-managed hosting platforms and write up our experience in detail.

Things I'd want to cover:

- cost
- perf
- DX/vibes
- review apps
- setup
- env/secrets
- scaling

What else would you want to see?

Define "plotting" 😉

For years I've been hearing the chorus of "I've had it with Heroku we're leaving", but the Judoscale numbers don't show it.

I don't think this is any different. We'll see...

Everyone is freaking out the Heroku blog post. Take a breath.

There's no way Heroku shuts down anytime soon.

The post confirms they won't be making improvements... how is that any different from the last decade?

Migrate eventually, but take your time. You literally have YEARS.

No idea. But we don't have this level of intel about Heroku either, right?

I'm not in that camp myself, but I'd recommend Hatchbox for sure.

Our experience: Worse performance, clunky UI, confusing process model and pricing. But some of our customers love it! 🤷‍♂️

If you're thinking of leaving Heroku, here's a simple mapping:

If you want the easiest switch, go with Render.

If you want Docker and more flexibility, go with Fly.

If you want to be a sysadmin, use a VPS (don't need to scale) or Amazon ECS (do need to scale)

Black Box Hosting vs. Glass Box Hosting: An Interview With Judoscale's Adam

Something a bit different on the Judoscale blog—Jon Sully interviewed ME to get my thoughts on hosting in 2026.

Really happy how this turned out!

judoscale.com/blog/black-...

Scaling Sideways: Why You Might Want To Run Two Production Apps

Two identical production apps running in parallel—or as Jon calls it, "scaling sideways"... just little technique we use to efficiently scale.

judoscale.com/blog/scalin...

Dealing With Heroku Memory Limits and Background Jobs

Full post here: judoscale.com/blog/priced...

On @searls.bsky.social latest podcast he mentioned "Heroku" and "price", so I can't help but respond. I made the post public since I think it's a really useful pattern.

tldr: Got a high-memory job that pushes you to perf dynos? Isolate it and scale to zero.

That looks really cool! (FYI @jeffmorhous.bsky.social)

Nearly 10 years (!!) of autoscaling, some patterns never change: noisy neighbors, too many queues, scaling workers to zero (and saving 💰), and the chaos of downscaling too far.

Stability is boring, repeatable choices.

Here's what we've learned 👉 judoscale.com/blog/autosc...

Adam McCrea: Judoscale - The Ruby Gems Podcast Adam McCrea shares how he turned a side project into JudoScale, a Ruby-focused auto-scaler now powering thousands of apps.  We discuss his origins in the Ruby community, how he (mostly) bootstrap...

On the latest episode of The Ruby Gems podcast, @adamlogic.com from @judoscale.com joins Marty Haught and I to discuss how to turned a side project into a full-time business. Give it a listen!

www.buzzsprout.com/2509083/epis...

Here's our write-up on the WHY and HOW of this whole goofy experiment.

judoscale.com/blog/rails-...

If I was responsible enough to do any sort of ROI calculation, this never would have happened. Instead, we went all-in on RailsConf with 15 homemade videos and a custom local-only app to run our booth. I'd do it all over again.