Bedtime Stories

Heroku Is Dead (And It Taught Us Everything We Know)

Gather round. Get comfortable, kids. Tonight, I’m going to read you a bedtime story.

This is the story of Heroku. The best place to run software that anybody ever built, and one of the least important things its owner has ever owned.

Your company has a platform team. Maybe you’re on it. They’re building an internal developer platform. It has a name with “launch” or “forge” or “runway” in it, a portal, a golden path, and a YAML file you fill in to get a database. It has been in progress for about two years.

Hold onto that. Because everything on that roadmap already shipped. Finished, priced and documented, in 2011. And the thing that shipped it is still running tonight — you can sign up in under a minute.

Your platform team is going to build it anyway.

Some of you deployed to it every day. Some of you have never heard the name.

Those two facts are the same story.

Stack Overflow Is Dying and ChatGPT Killed It

Gather round. Get comfortable, kids. Tonight, I’m going to read you a bedtime story.

This is the story of Stack Overflow. The machine that taught a generation of programmers how to copy and paste.

And you know Stack Overflow. Unless you started programming very recently, you have found the answer to a problem on Stack Overflow, copied the solution into your code, and accepted the praise when everything worked. That’s all right. I won’t tell anyone.

For a generation, Stack Overflow was the most important tool developers pretended they were not using. Now it is fading, and nobody knows whether it will reinvent itself or become a footnote in the history of the industry it helped build.

So tonight, I will tell you how Stack Overflow came into being, why it worked so well, what went wrong, and what it is trying to become next.

Is Jenkins Dead? No, And That's Much Worse

Gather round. Get comfortable, kids. Tonight, I’m going to read you a bedtime story.

This is the tale of Jenkins. The butler who never once said no.

Now, this is not one of those stories where the hero loses. Jenkins won. Jenkins won everything. For the better part of a decade, if you wrote software for a living, Jenkins stood between your keyboard and your customers, and it built your code, and it tested it, and it shipped it, every single night, without ever once being thanked.

And here’s the thing.

Almost nobody chooses Jenkins any more. Ask around your office and you will find people who would rip it out tomorrow morning. They can’t. Twenty-odd years after a young engineer at Sun Microsystems wrote the first version of it, it is still there, still running the thing that actually ships your product, and everybody has quietly agreed not to fucking touch it.

So tuck in. Because tonight’s nightmare isn’t that our hero dies at the end. It’s that he doesn’t. He is still running tonight. And you cannot switch him off.

Docker's Rise and Fall: The Nightmare of Winning Too Well

Gather round. Get comfortable, kids. Tonight, I’m going to read you a bedtime story.

This is the tale of Docker. The whale who carries the world.

And like all the best bedtime stories, it starts with a dream, it’s full of wonder in the middle, and it ends with everyone screaming.

Because this isn’t one of those stories where the hero loses. Oh no. This is worse. This is the story of a hero who won. Who won so completely that his name became a verb, that he conquered every data center on the planet, that he changed how the entire industry ships software forever.

So tuck in. Because tonight’s nightmare is the scariest kind there is. The kind where you do everything right, and it still isn’t enough.