How long before I get in?

We are sending out tons of invites every day. We’d prefer not to have a waiting list, but doing it this way allows us to let people in only as we’re sure our infrastructure can handle the load. The number of people we let in each day keeps increasing, as our existing users give us feedback (thanks guys!) which helps us improve our product for the next batch of people coming in.

One of the areas we are most interested in is collaboration – this is, after all, a web application. We want to encourage existing users to invite their friends to become users and start collaborating with them, so we have given existing users the ability invite friends directly. So if you want to get an account faster, ask a friend for an invite.

If you are on the waiting list, we haven’t forgotten about you. We will get to you soon, and we really appreciate your patience.

I found a bug, what do I do?
What kind of feedback do you want?

Whether you actively found a bug, something just doesn’t seem to work or doesn’t work as expected, you can’t do something you want to do, or you have feature requests, please please please tell us! The whole purpose of this limited beta is to get your feedback and use it to make Heroku awesome and rock solid.

What about my existing tools and editor?
Do you support subversion?
Can you make your editor better?

We are hardcore vi, TextMate, and subversion fans. We will not consider Heroku completely usable until editing and version control either works as well as those tools, or there is a way to continue to use those tools with our service.

The existing Heroku editor absolutely works for making Rails applications. We know because we use it. So we also know that it kind of blows, as real developer editors go (so far we do think we’ve beat Notepad, though perhaps just slightly). It is getting better all the time, and we have some specific reasons we want to make a browser-based editor, which we’ll talk about in another post soon.

In the meantime, there are a couple of things you can do:

Import & Export

If you want to edit locally and deploy to Heroku, you can make liberal use of the import and export features. Setup your whole app locally, then just import it into Heroku. Your archive will replace the existing code base. If you make changes on Heroku and want to continue working locally, just export the app.

Snapshots

Snapshots allow you to take a named snapshot of your app’s code and data at any point. You can take as many snapshots as you want for version control purposes. Take a backup snapshot before you import, or take a snapshot before you try some crazy edits.

Can I import my huge complicated app?
What about MySQL versus PostgreSQL?

Yes, you can import your huge complicated app. It may or may not work. If it doesn’t work, please tell us about it. Also, there is currently a 10MB limit for the storage footprint of each app. If your uploaded app is larger, you will see an overlimit message.

We are using PostgreSQL internally for several really important reasons, but we do plan to fully support MySQL database dumps, both in and out. We are almost done with this feature, so look for it soon.