We REALLY want to know what's going on at Heroku ...so we wrote them a letter 🤷‍♂️

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.

What's happening at Heroku, and what does it mean for your team? judoscale.com/blog/heroku...

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

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.

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!

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?

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.

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)

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-...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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.

I love my job

As requested by absolutely no one, a supercut of every kazoo clip we made for #railsconf2025

Really hope we don’t get kicked out of the last #railsconf for bringing kazoos 🎶

Visit our booth at #railsconf to get your kazoo! Watching us make fools of ourselves is just a bonus.

Who’s ready to party? #railsconf #kazoos

If it’s not at least a little bit cringe, we didn’t go far enough. #railsconf #kazoos #marketing

Marketing technique #77: Humiliate yourself for attention. #railsconf #kazoos

Y’all this is only the beginning. Buckle up! #railsconf #kazoos

Most autoscalers are reactive—they respond to traffic after it spikes. That’s usually fine… until it’s not. If your app gets hit with big surges of traffic all at once, even the fastest queue-time autoscaler might not spin up capacity in time to avoid slowdowns or timeouts.

One week until #railsconf! The whole Judoscale team will be there with... kazoos?

Choosing a Python task queue? Jeff Morhous compared Celery vs RQ: 🧠 Celery: Feature-rich but complex 🚀 RQ: Simple & easy to deploy Jeff's advice: Most apps do fine with RQ until they need more horsepower. Then consider making the switch to Celery.

🔌 Big news! Custom platform integrations coming soon to Judoscale! Create your own adapter, keep your infrastructure, get all the autoscaling magic. Message me if you want early access. What platform would you connect with?

I finally answered my questions about shared CPUs on Fly.io: - How are they so cheap? - Why do I need so many of them? - Why does perf tank after 10 minutes? Turns out it's well-documented: "shared" machines only get 1/16 of each CPU! fly.io/docs/machin...

Last week I dug into HTTP routing behavior on Fly.io, and it's so cool! Unlike random routing on platforms like Heroku, Fly can intelligently route requests to machines based on a load. Here are the configs you need to know...

If you have more than one worker process sitting idle while the job queue is empty, you're throwing away money. And for queues with an SLO > 30 seconds, that number drops to zero.

"Does Rails 8 truly make platforms a thing of the past? And can small to medium-sized teams really save money by self-hosting?" Preech it, Jeff! From the Honeybadger blog: www.honeybadger.io/blog/rails-...

Feeling very thankful today as Carlos Antonio and I celebrate his one year anniversary at Judoscale. 🥳 Carlos helps me level-up as a developer and feel more relaxed and confident as a founder. And with him Judoscale is a better product than ever. Thanks, Carlos! 🥂

My final comment about the latest Remote Ruby episode... @excid3.com & @andrewm.codes mentioned Judoscale like 15 times! How much do we have to pay to make it 20? 😉 Seriously, love you guys! 🙌

Next warm take, this one on getting your company to send you to conferences... It's *not* worth it from an educational perspective. Most talks are available online. Let go of that argument. The value in conferences is in the networking, but that's value to YOU, not your company

I have a few warm takes in response to @excid3.com & @andrewm.codes latest Remote Ruby episode... First, on hybrid work environments: I disagree that they should be run "remote first", having all meetings in Zoom, etc.

On stage at Sin City Ruby, I asked who already knew about Judoscale. Most hands went up. 🙋 Does this mean... 1. Marketing to Ruby devs is working! Keep going! 2. We've saturated the Ruby market. Invest elsewhere! 3. Ruby devs love to raise their hands.

The 131 edition of @shortruby.com is out. This edition is sponsored by @adamlogic.com from Judoscale. #Ruby #Rails #Newsletter Let me share 👇 some highlights from this edition

I love this deep dive into importmap and propshaft from Radan Skorić We use both at Judoscale, and even though each of these are simple in isolation, it's crucial to understand how they work together. radanskoric.com/articles/ra...

"One queue per worker" is the way. Sidekiq, Solid Queue, doesn't matter. In other words, each queue should have a dedicated worker process. But isn't that wasteful?? Nope. You autoscale them down to zero when they’re idle. They’ll start back up when jobs are enqueued.

I've really been into Slack "canvases" lately. Here's how we use them to track & plan our content publishing calendar as a small team. It's just a simple doc with a permanent tab in our #marketing channel. No need for a full calendar in Notion or anything like that. KISS

I thought I knew the "right" way to set up SSL on Heroku, but I was wrong. Here’s what I learned: 🔐 Heroku’s automatic SSL now plays nice with Cloudflare’s “Full (strict)” mode 🙅‍♂️ You can ditch the manual origin cert setup in Cloudflare 🙄 Don't trust Heroku's help docs

As good as request queue time is for autoscaling, it’s still a *reactive* metric. Queue time grows when you’re nearing capacity. If your app is prone to sudden traffic spikes, you want *proactive* autoscaling, ensuring *excess* capacity at all times. 🍳 something's cooking...

Wanna hear me talk about starting Judoscale as a side business, going full-time, and eventually building a team?

The Boring Stack 🥱 in practice... 🧱 Frameworks with staying power: Think Rails, Django, Laravel. 🦖 Databases that last decades: Postgres, MySQL. 🪄 Infrastructure that just works: PaaS platforms like Heroku, Render, or Fly.

How am I just now finding out about @joshwcomeau.com?? Quite possibly my favorite site right now. So fun! I'm on the waitlist for his Whimsical Animations course. 😁 www.joshwcomeau.com/blog/whimsi...

Exciting to see autoscaling in action for our latest integration with Fly.io! (because CPU is a poor metric for queue capacity)

Help me fix our pricing page! I've had multiple people tell me our "freemium" plan is not clear. Like, they didn't even realize we HAD a free plan. I can see a couple issues, but what else? How can I make it clear??

@andycroll.bsky.social Hey Andy! How difficult would it be to offer gift certificates to rubytshirts.com? I'd love to buy some for giveaways—specifically at Sin City Ruby next month.