Interview: Adam Wiggins on Heroku

On the eve of the first ever online “Introduction to Sinatra” course, Satish Talim and Victor H. Goff III of RubyLearning caught up with Adam Wiggins and talked to him on Heroku (pronounced her-OH-koo), in this interview.

Satish Talim>> Welcome, Adam and thanks for taking out time to share your thoughts. For the benefit of the readers, could you tell us something about your self?

Adam Wiggins>> By day, I’m a Rubyist and entrepeneur. By night, I evangelize critical thinking and skepticism, pontificate about economics and cognition, and hack on music software and video games. Some people have said that I’m a nice guy, but I vehemently deny such a vicious rumor!

I blog at: http://adam.blog.heroku.com/

Heroku – It’s fast, it’s easy, and it just works.

Satish>> What’s Heroku and how did you get involved with it?

Adam>> I co-founded Heroku along with my partners Orion and James in autumn 2007. Our elevator pitch is “instant Ruby deployment.” Heroku is the fastest and simplest way to get a Rails, Merb, or Sinatra app into production.

Satish>> For a person new to development using Rack and Rack-based web frameworks (like Sinatra, Merb, Ramaze, and Camping), how can Heroku help?

Adam>> Passenger has done a lot for standardizing and simplifying the deployment of Rack apps, but it’s still up to you to provision your own server. Since basic Heroku apps are free, there’s nothing to stop anyone with basic proficiency in Ruby and Git from getting their app online instantly.

Check out our tutorial on deploying a Rack app.

Victor>> What is the long term goal of Heroku?

Adam>> I like to think that we’re championing a revolution in app deployment, similar to the agile revolution that happened in app development over the past decade. Our vision is for deploying apps into production to be as easy, fast, and fun as building apps with Rails or the other great Ruby frameworks.

Victor>> When are you going to be ready for Prices and Options for Heroku?

Adam>> Pricing is already in beta. We don’t publish dates, but we should have something for public consumption soon. If you’d like to participate in the pricing beta, contact us: http://heroku.com/about.

Victor>> I understand that Heroku can be used with Git, but does that mean I have to leave my other versioning tools behind, or does it play well with others?

Adam>> Git can live alongside Subversion or other version-control tools. In fact, using them in tandem is a pretty good way to ease into learning Git. You can also use Git purely as a deployment mechanism, as described here.

Victor>> Where can I find out where you are going to be speaking and when?

Adam>> Last year I spoke at Railsconf and Rubyconf, among others. This year I’ll be doing a talk about Rack, Sinatra, and Rails Metal at Railsconf, and participating in a panel with a bunch of great folks including the authors of Rack and Thin.

You can always find out what events I and the other cool dudes here at Heroku are attending, on the sidebar to our blog.

Satish & Victor>> Thanks Adam for sharing your views with the Introduction to Sinatra⁰^ ” and ” Introduction to Merb⁰^ ” course participants. You can connect with Adam on twitter here.

Disclaimer:\ The opinions expressed are those of Adam Wiggins and do not necessarily reflect those of RubyLearning.org.

1. Introduction to Sinatra: Here are the course details. ↩
2. Introduction to Merb: Here are the course details. ↩