Baltimore, Here We Come!

Next week is RailsConf in Baltimore, and Heroku is coming out in force. There will be about a dozen of us attending sessions, manning our booth, and chatting with Rubyists, so definitely keep an eye out for us!

To make it a bit easier, here’s a quick summary of when and where we’ll be:

Monday, May 16th

• At 6pm, Ben Scofield will be part of the second annual Ignite RailsConf. He’s giving a five-minute talk on How To Be Awesome (From a Counter-Example).

Tuesday, May 17th

• The Expo Hall opens up Tuesday morning, so you’ll be able to visit the Heroku booth to find us, talk about deployment, and grab some swag. We’ll be around from...

Heroku is fully behind Ruby 1.9.2 as the new gold standard for production Ruby apps. Over the past few months, we’ve seen more and more developers move to the Bamboo 1.9.2 stack. It’s fast, stable, and increasingly sees excellent support throughout the community.

In February, we said that we’d be reviewing the state of 1.9.2 support with the eventual goal of switching the default for new Ruby apps on Heroku from 1.8.7 to 1.9.2. Today, we’re announcing the date of that switchover.

As of June 1st, 2011, all new Ruby applications on Heroku will be run on Ruby 1.9.2 by default. (Existing applications won’t be affected, and you can always create a new application...

At Heroku, we’ve been watching the progress of MRI very carefully for a while now; we added support for 1.9.1 nearly a year ago and 1.9.2 more recently, and we’ve seen thousands of apps created and running successfully on the 1.9 series of VMs. At the same time, we’ve seen the community as a whole recognize the importance of 1.9 by migrating libraries and gems to it and providing resources and tutorials on upgrading.

Today, Heroku is putting our full support behind Ruby 1.9.2 as the future of MRI. It is a stable, battle-tested, production-quality Ruby, and we’re excited to see it become the mainstay for future Ruby development.

What this means today

We encourage...

We’re very excited about the growth of the add-on ecosystem following the launch of the provider program — with dozens of add-ons in various stages of release, our developers have access to a wide variety of functionality for their applications. One of the most recent additions to the generally-available add-on catalog is IndexTank, a real-time search-as-a-service with some great features.

In order to celebrate their release, IndexTank is sponsoring a contest over the holiday season. From last week until January 6th, they’re inviting developers to build the best app they can using the IndexTank add-on. You can see the full details over on IndexTank’s blog, but the...

Last night, we threw our first-ever Heroku Users Group meetup, and it was a hit!

Fifty Heroku users, add-on developers, entrepreneurs, and more gathered at our new office to get to know the Heroku team and swap stories with each other. We heard about some of the remarkable applications people are building on the platform, and we’re very excited to publicize those more — at future HUGs, in our newsletter, and here on the blog.

For this first meetup, though, we decided to open the curtains around Heroku’s inner workings a bit. Adam gave a great talk about five new features that should make life easier, particularly for people working on large-scale applications:

• ...

A few weeks ago, we announced our first-ever Heroku Users Group (known henceforth and forever more as a HUG, showing just how much we love our developers!) meetup. We’re now a week away, and we thought it’d be a good time to go into a little more detail about the plan.

On November 3rd at 7pm, we’re opening the doors to anyone who uses Heroku – developers who deploy to us, businesses built on our platform, add-on providers who create and manage services for our users, and more. We’re eager to get everyone in the same room, and we’re looking forward to see the new ideas and developments that will come out of all of us talking at this (and at future)...

It’s no secret that Heroku’s getting pretty big. Heck, we advertise the number of apps running on the platform right there on the homepage (over 88,000, when I last looked). We’ve got tens of thousands of developers, and you all have been doing some amazing work — the success stories we’ve posted are only the tip of the iceberg. With that in mind, we thought it was high time we started to get all of you together. So, on November 3rd, we’re going to hold the first official Heroku Users Group meeting. Join us at our office at 7pm to meet other Heroku users and engineers, hear war stories from the front lines, learn tips and tricks, and ask those burning...