Heroku



  • Ok so one of the apps we've had running on Heroku was shut down a few weeks ago, we "let go" the idiot dev who was developing and maintaining it, and the slightly-less-idiot dev who knows Heroku is on PTO today. And guess what? The boss wants to grab some data from it, so he asks me if I can temporarily restart it.

    Well I have a Heroku login so let's give it a go! It can't be that much worse than AWS can it?

    Yes.

    Yes it can.

    I can get a list of VMs, but I can't figure out how to connect to any of them, or figure out what's in them. (I can get a list of changes and roll-back to previous versions though.) There's a list of "Dynos" (No definition of the term, natch, obviously everybody knows what a "dyno" is, duh!) There's a list of domains and error pages I can get to. And a GitHub repo URL which is somehow and for some reason attached to the VM? There's an Info section that reads like this:

    @Heroku said:

    Stack: cedar
    Framework: Ruby/Rails
    Git URL: ---@heroku.com:---.git
    Repo size: 13.8 MB
    Slug size: 14.8 MB of 200 MB

    (In addition to "Dynos" the VM also has a "slug size". Obviously. Don't bother putting a tooltip on that or defining it anywhere, Heroku, everybody knows what a "slug size" is.)

    Heroku has a .exe installer that installs-- something? It doesn't put any icons on the desktop or in the Start menu, but digging around in my Program Files it seems to install:
    1) Ruby. Because of course it does.
    2) Yet another copy of Git, because this computer didn't already have fucking 2 installed already
    3) A batch file that, when clicked, does nothing but close itself. (Yes, yes, I know I could open a console window and see if it spit out text but frankly I don't give a shit.

    But hey look it's all open source-y!!!!!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    A batch file that, when clicked, does nothing but close itself.
     

    ...you ran a batch file without having a look inside?



  • Never seen or heard of heroku until I saw this sidebar forum post. So I decided to google it and find out what you're complaining about.
    Turns out that you could read, well, anything on their site about "how it works" and have answered every question you just had in less time than it took to complain about it.








    But I'm sure it's easy to stumble through every other non-heroku type of development environment without reading any documentation on how it works.



  • Just yesterday I was able to analyze a Haskell program without ever having read about the language before!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    There's a list of "Dynos" (No definition of the term, natch, obviously everybody knows what a "dyno" is, duh!)

    @blakeyrat said:

    (In addition to "Dynos" the VM also has a "slug size". Obviously. Don't bother putting a tooltip on that or defining it anywhere, Heroku, everybody knows what a "slug size" is.)

    Yes, isn't it terrible when people use technical terms and acronyms without defining them?  It's not like Google exists or manuals or anything like that.

    @blakeyrat said:

    the slightly-less-idiot dev who knows Heroku is on PTO today.

    Oops!

    (Fortunately I have a brain and can work it out for myself.) 

    This space intentionally left blank for Blakey to explain why it's OK for some acronyms to be left undefined because everyone knows what they mean, where by "everyone" he means himself.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @darkmattar said:

    So I decided to google it and find out what you're complaining about.
    Turns out that you could read, well, anything on their site about "how it works" and have answered every question you just had in less time than it took to complain about it.

    Don't even think about going there. It's obviously shit software, since a compulsive clicker like blakey can't figure it out at first glance.



  • Doesn't Heroku run on top of AWS? And don't both have an embarrassing history of catastrophic failures and prolonged outages?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    There's a list of "Dynos" (No definition of the term, natch, obviously everybody knows what a "dyno" is, duh!)
    Giant lizards that roamed the earth millions of years ago?



  • @da Doctah said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    There's a list of "Dynos" (No definition of the term, natch, obviously everybody knows what a "dyno" is, duh!)
    Giant lizards that roamed the earth millions of years ago?

    They aren't lizards, jackass.



  • @DaveK said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    the slightly-less-idiot dev who knows Heroku is on PTO today.

    pretty tired obviously?

    paid to ovulate?

    partial terrain overload?

    WHAT COULD IT MEAN



  • Click things randomly until you either succeed in starting the VM, or accidentally delete the VM.


  • Considered Harmful

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @da Doctah said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    There's a list of "Dynos" (No definition of the term, natch, obviously everybody knows what a "dyno" is, duh!)
    Giant lizards that roamed the earth millions of years ago?

    They aren't lizards, jackass.

    Doesn't the word dinosaur etymologically mean "terrible lizard"?



  • @joe.edwards said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @da Doctah said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    There's a list of "Dynos" (No definition of the term, natch, obviously everybody knows what a "dyno" is, duh!)
    Giant lizards that roamed the earth millions of years ago?

    They aren't lizards, jackass.

    Doesn't the word dinosaur etymologically mean "terrible lizard"?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Doesn't Heroku run on top of AWS? And don't both have an embarrassing history of catastrophic failures and prolonged outages?

    Neither one of those sounds as bad as having to pay to deal with blakey day in and day out.

    You've been gone for a while, but blakey and his company are all about using the cloud.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Doesn't Heroku run on top of AWS?

    Yes, which is why I told this guy (before he was fired) that it's fucking stupid to use a cloud environment that just outsources to another, easier-to-use, more-featureful, cloud environment we have more expertise in. Pay more, get less... smart policy.

    @morbiuswilters said:

    And don't both have an embarrassing history of catastrophic failures and prolonged outages?

    AWS is good as long as you're not dumb enough to put all your instances in the same data center and availability zone. It can get tricky with shared databases, though.



  • @db2 said:

    Click things randomly until you either succeed in starting the VM, or accidentally delete the VM.

    My hunch is that the instance that actually ran the website is already deleted, either through incompetence or malice. (Maybe it's backed-up somewhere I can't find, who knows.)

    I told my boss our best bet was to use the "roll-back" feature on the one instance that looks like it's associated with the project and see if the website magically comes back up, but if it doesn't I'm stumped. He said nevermind.



  • @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    A batch file that, when clicked, does nothing but close itself.
     

    ...you ran a batch file without having a look inside?

    Yeah. And I didn't die somehow. Shocking.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    A batch file that, when clicked, does nothing but close itself.
     

    ...you ran a batch file without having a look inside?

    Yeah. And I didn't die somehow. Shocking.

    Hey blakey, do me a favor and put this into a batch file and run it for me, okay?

    %0|%0

    It prints out my credit card number.


  • Considered Harmful

    @Ben L. said:

    @joe.edwards said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    @da Doctah said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    There's a list of "Dynos" (No definition of the term, natch, obviously everybody knows what a "dyno" is, duh!)
    Giant lizards that roamed the earth millions of years ago?

    They aren't lizards, jackass.

    Doesn't the word dinosaur etymologically mean "terrible lizard"?

    I need to send that guy a cease and desist.



  • I tried Heroku once. I just needed to host a small web app, and they had a free plan, so it seemed good at first. But for some reason you have to install a client in your computer to manage your server-that-is-not-actually-a-server. And you need to use git to upload things to it. What the hell, I don't want to use a version control system, I just want to upload my files. Isn't there some kind of file transfer protocol I could use instead?



  • @blakeyrat said:

    AWS is good as long as you're not dumb enough to put all your instances in the same data center and availability zone. It can get tricky with shared databases, though.

    Yeah, it's not, although unfortunately I seem to always get stuck with someone's half-completed, all-in-one-AZ install. I've been in charge of admining several hundred EC2 instances at a few companies now.



  • @joe.edwards said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @da Doctah said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    There's a list of "Dynos" (No definition of the term, natch, obviously everybody knows what a "dyno" is, duh!)
    Giant lizards that roamed the earth millions of years ago?

    They aren't lizards, jackass.

    Doesn't the word dinosaur etymologically mean "terrible lizard"?

    Yes, but that was made up by Victorians, who weren't bright people.

    They're actually reptiles that are distinct from lizards (and distinct from any currently-living known reptiles). I was just being a pedantic dickweed.



  • @joe.edwards said:

    @Ben L. said:
    @joe.edwards said:
    @morbiuswilters said:
    @da Doctah said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    There's a list of "Dynos" (No definition of the term, natch, obviously everybody knows what a "dyno" is, duh!)
    Giant lizards that roamed the earth millions of years ago?

    They aren't lizards, jackass.

    Doesn't the word dinosaur etymologically mean "terrible lizard"?

    I need to send that guy a cease and desist.

    Holy shit, that's the guy who owns The Pageant?



  • @Ben L. said:

    @DaveK said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    the slightly-less-idiot dev who knows Heroku is on PTO today.
    pretty tired obviously?

    paid to ovulate?

    partial terrain overload?

    WHAT COULD IT MEAN

    Post traumatic origami?

    And what about AWS? American Weekend Society? Amateur Water Sprinklers?

     


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Ben L. said:

    @DaveK said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    the slightly-less-idiot dev who knows Heroku is on PTO today.

    pretty tired obviously?

    paid to ovulate?

    partial terrain overload?

    WHAT COULD IT MEAN

    I'm guessing 'personal/paid time off' or, as I understand it, more colloquially called 'taking a sickie.'


  • @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    A batch file that, when clicked, does nothing but close itself.
     

    ...you ran a batch file without having a look inside?

    Which was put on to his system by a binary he ran without disassembling it.

    TRWTF is that he didn't look into the batch file after it failed to do anything. He's not even on Linux where he gets no hint that it needs to be run from a console. It would take all of fifteen seconds for a serious Windows user to run it from a shell and look at the output.



  • There is the whole "I don't really give a fuck" issue as well.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    They're actually reptiles that are distinct from lizards (and distinct from any currently-living known reptiles). I was just being a pedantic dickweed.
     

    You have likely eaten reptile of the same family several time in your life. They are called bird, and usually chicken nugget are allegedly created from birds.

     



  • @blakeyrat said:

    There is the whole "I don't really give a fuck" issue as well.

    Ignorance is the enemy of progress.



  • @gu3st said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    There is the whole "I don't really give a fuck" issue as well.

    blakeyrat is the enemy of progress.

    FTFY



  • @gu3st said:

    @blakeyrat said:
    There is the whole "I don't really give a fuck" issue as well.

    Ignorance is the enemy of progress.

    This presumes all knowledge is equivalent in its value. Obviously, this is not true.

    Actually, you're wrong for another reason, too: specialization of labor is a fundamental aspect of progress and, by it's very nature, implies vast ignorance. If Einstein had spent his time trudging through mediocre documentation for half-baked software, he never would have unlocked the key to travel between parallel universes.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @gu3st said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    There is the whole "I don't really give a fuck" issue as well.

    Ignorance is the enemy of progress.

    This presumes all knowledge is equivalent in its value. Obviously, this is not true.

    Photons, like all quantum objects, exhibit both wave-like and particle-like properties.

    This text is blue.



  • @Ben L. said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @gu3st said:
    @blakeyrat said:
    There is the whole "I don't really give a fuck" issue as well.

    Ignorance is the enemy of progress.

    This presumes all knowledge is equivalent in its value. Obviously, this is not true.

    Photons, like all quantum objects, exhibit both wave-like and particle-like properties.

    This text is blue.

    [Pipe]

    Ceci n'est pas une pipe.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    They're actually reptiles that are distinct from lizards (and distinct from any currently-living known reptiles). I was just being a pedantic dickweed
    Birds are Dinosaurs http://www.amnh.org/explore/science-topics/birds-are-dinosaurs



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    If Einstein had spent his time trudging through mediocre documentation for half-baked software, he never would have unlocked the key to travel between parallel universes.
     

    But wait a second... he didn't really unlock anything like that...

    OMG! That means he was actually secretly trudging through mediocre documentation for half-baked software!



  • The real WTF is that you are complaining about tools that you obvious don't understand.   Heroku is not just a virtual host provider, they provide an easy to manage way to deploy rails applications - and so you probably need to know the whole ecosystem of rails for it to make sense.  I would probably be equally confused and frustrated trying to deploy a java system.  I vaguely remember something about .war files... wtf?  ;)

     Heroku does not allow direct logins to the vm; you have to use their tools to perform actions.   If you just need to grab the data, I would suggest a database dump:

    https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-import-export

    or 

    https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/pgbackups

     

     



  • @esoterik said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    They're actually reptiles that are distinct from lizards (and distinct from any currently-living known reptiles). I was just being a pedantic dickweed
    Birds are Dinosaurs http://www.amnh.org/explore/science-topics/birds-are-dinosaurs
     

    Yes, we know. What are you trying to say?


  • I saw an ad on tv a bit ago for an exhibition on dinosaurs. The tagline was "when chicken had teeth", a reference to an idiomatic expression equivalent to "when pigs fly". I thought that was kind of clever.



  • @esoterik said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    They're actually reptiles that are distinct from lizards (and distinct from any currently-living known reptiles). I was just being a pedantic dickweed
    Birds are Dinosaurs http://www.amnh.org/explore/science-topics/birds-are-dinosaurs

    No, they aren't. Birds descended from dinosaurs. Saying birds are dinosaurs is like saying you are a protozoa (although that might be closer to the truth..)



  • @georgir said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    If Einstein had spent his time trudging through mediocre documentation for half-baked software, he never would have unlocked the key to travel between parallel universes.
     

    But wait a second... he didn't really unlock anything like that...

    What the hell are you talking about? There are Quantaports in every major city in the worl--

    Oh sweet Jesus, I've leapt into a Dead End universe; one where Einstein died before giving the world the secrets of quantum travel, unlimited free energy and a penis enlargement cream that actually works! A universe where all scientific progress eventually stalls and society devolves into bands of retarded people terrorizing the few remaining intelligent people over the Internet!

    I'll never see my family again. I'll never be able to make my report to President Garry Schandling. I'm stuck in this shitty universe for the rest of my generically-engineered, 500-year-long life!



  • @notromda said:

    Heroku is not just a virtual host provider, they provide an easy to manage way to deploy rails applications - and so you probably need to know the whole ecosystem of rails for it to make sense.

    @notromda said:

    https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-import-export

    Rails? Postgres? Wow, Heroku really wanted their name to be a metonym for absolute failure, didn't they?



  • @Zecc said:

    I saw an ad on tv a bit ago for an exhibition on dinosaurs. The tagline was "when chicken had teeth", a reference to an idiomatic expression equivalent to "when pigs fly". I thought that was kind of clever.

    "When TDWTFers reproduced asexually.."

    Wait, that's probably a bad example.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @notromda said:
    Heroku is not just a virtual host provider, they provide an easy to manage way to deploy rails applications - and so you probably need to know the whole ecosystem of rails for it to make sense.

    @notromda said:

    https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/heroku-postgres-import-export

    Rails? Postgres? Wow, Heroku really wanted their name to be a metonym for absolute failure, didn't they?

    How exactly is Rails an absolute failure? Thousands of successful, high profile sites are powered by it. Basecamp, Hulu, SlideShare, GitHub, Shopify, Zendesk, etc. Even .NET darling Jeff Atwood, co-creator of Stack Overflow, has chosen to use Rails instead of .NET to build the new Discourse forum software. Meanwhile we get to wallow in this beautifully architected .NET Community Server forum.

    I'm not even a Rails developer, nor do I hate .NET, but I'm not willfully ignorant to the fact that Rails is a huge success just because it's isn't the platform I develop for.



  • @Soviut said:

    Thousands of successful, high profile sites are powered by it. Basecamp, Hulu, SlideShare, GitHub, Shopify, Zendesk, etc.

    Twitter. Oh,wait..

    And Basecamp? SlideShare? Shopify? Zendesk? Fuck, I hadn't even heard of the last 3. And Basecamp is such a laughably bad piece of "software".. I would have been more impressed if you'd told me about a Rails-powered phishing site that was riddled with spelling errors, I really would.

    @Soviut said:

    Jeff Atwood

    Atwood's an idiot. I used to like reading his blog because you got to watch somebody with absolutely no software development experience at all learn things like version control and hashing the password. Then he decided this meager amount of knowledge qualified him as an expert and we just ended up with another fucking Spolsky.

    @Soviut said:

    ...Stack Overflow...

    The theory of SO was that you could somehow extract real, usable human knowledge through a forum-like environment. How has that worked out here? SO is littered with confused, wrong, nonsense answers, as well as half-baked opinions masquerading as fact and best-practice. When SO pages come up in a Google result, I sometimes click over just to have a good chuckle. It's the equivalent of blind people designing a billboard to advertise a school for the blind.

    @Soviut said:

    ...has chosen to use Rails instead of .NET to build the new Discourse forum software.

    That sounds about right. Atwood probably just discovered Rails last week and hasn't progressed past 2006 levels of hype. In other news, he also has high hopes for this Senator Obama fellow.

    @Soviut said:

    Meanwhile we get to wallow in this beautifully architected .NET Community Server forum.

    The fact that .NET can be used to build bad software does not prove that Rails can build good software.

    @Soviut said:

    ...Rails is a huge success...

    Seriously, did you just awake from a hibernation pod after 5 years in cryo-sleep? Because this is the shit I'd expect to hear from someone in 2008, but not someone in 2013. From practically everything I've heard, Rails has been a laughingstock since at least 2009.


    Side note: I once met with some people from a moderately-well-known (although probably still insolvent) start-up to see if I'd let them hire me. I found out they used Rails, which was a serious WTF moment, but the best part was listening to their tech people talk about it. See, they'd hired some high-profile Rails guys to help them. I asked why they needed to hire high-profile Rails guys if Rails was such a stunning framework that anybody could use. Wouldn't that be a bit like hiring Bill Gates to set up your Windows computer? They really had no answer, though. The thought had never crossed their tiny, diseased minds that "Rails is an amazing platform anybody can use to build a super-awesome application right out of the box" and "We hired all the Rails people we could bribe just so they could keep our piece-of-shit site chugging along on this ill-chosen platform" were somewhat contradictory statements.

    They also spoke only in buzzword-laden, touchy-feely bullshit. They asked me who my "software heros" were and I told them Alan Turing because he got out before he had to see C++. (Okay, I didn't actually say that, I was just completely blindsided by how retarded the question was. I was like "Software heros?? I don't.. what does that mean??" I finally told them I had none, which caused them to tsk-tsk. They then asked me who I subscribed to on Twitter and I told them I never used Twitter and never would.) Anyway, I thanked them for buying my 4 beers and walked out, never to see them again.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Seriously, did you just awake from a hibernation pod after 5 years in cryo-sleep? Because this is the shit I'd expect to hear from someone in 2008, but not someone in 2013. From practically everything I've heard, Rails has been a laughingstock since at least 2009.

    Rails has matured and mellowed far past the old hype era of 2008 that you mention. It's Node.js that's the new hotness these days or flavour of the month PHP frameworks like Laravel. So no, I didn't "just wake from cryosleep", I'm referring to a diverse set of real world apps that are used by millions. But nice try with the "from what I've heard" anecdotal evidence, you're clearly the industry barometer. Incidentally, Heroku can also host Python frameworks like Django and Flask, but I'm sure you consider those laughingstocks too because they run Disqus, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. I'm sure you hate those services, so by association, those frameworks must be garbage too, right?



  • @Soviut said:

    Incidentally, Heroku can also host Python frameworks like Django and Flask,

    Another minor WTF: one of the Heroku sites Idiot-We-Fired set up was entirely PHP. But he ran it in Heroku anyway, even though Heroku doesn't support PHP. Apparently the solution was extremely hacky.

    And yes, again, I brought up the whole, "why are we paying more and getting less with this Heroku bullshit? Especially when AWS instances can run PHP with literally zero configuration?" What an idiot.



  • @Soviut said:

    Rails has matured and mellowed far past the old hype era of 2008 that you mention.

    Isn't that exactly what I said? That the hype around it is dead? Just because it's no longer being hyped does not mean it's suddenly improved.

    @Soviut said:

    It's Node.js that's the new hotness these days or flavour of the month PHP frameworks like Laravel.

    Node at least offers a somewhat novel model for scripting; one that's actually proven in lots of real-world environments. Still, yeah, it's over-hyped wankery and the code is spaghetti barf. How is any of this relevant to proving that Rails isn't a joke?

    @Soviut said:

    ...I'm referring to a diverse set of real world apps that are used by millions.

    Millions of people listen to Taylor Swift. What the fuck is your point? Most people are stupider than cattle, just less delicious.

    @Soviut said:

    But nice try with the "from what I've heard" anecdotal evidence, you're clearly the industry barometer.

    The "industry" is mostly made up of people who are hoping to becoming billionaires by making a Facebook clone written in Rails/Node/Erlang/whatever. These are the same shit-for-brains who didn't see the first dot-com crash coming and who will, once again, be surprised to find themselves unemployed when the second one hits. Here's an actually-useful Rails app that will be used by millions: an app to automatically file for unemployment benefits.

    @Soviut said:

    Incidentally, Heroku can also host Python frameworks like Django and Flask, but I'm sure you consider those laughingstocks too because they run Disqus, Instagram, Pinterest, etc. I'm sure you hate those services, so by association, those frameworks must be garbage too, right?

    Python is fine, but what does that prove about Heroku? Or for that matter Disqus (never heard of it); Instagram (sepia-toned photos are now a killer app?); and Pinterest (isn't this what ladies use to share casserole recipes? Okay, that's actually useful..) They drank purple Kool-Aid at Jonestown; now, purple Kool-Aid is pretty awesome, but does that automatically mean Jonestown was awesome?

    Seriously, you are the kind of "developer" I can't stand. One who's fallen hook, line and sinker for the bullshit hype. How many times have you said "Web 2.0" in the last year? How about "social media" or "convergence"?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    How many times have you said "Web 2.0" in the last year? How about "social media" or "convergence"?

    How many times have you saidtyped them IN THE LAST HALF HOUR?



  • @Soviut said:

    How exactly is Rails an absolute failure? Thousands of successful, high profile sites are powered by it. Basecamp, Hulu, SlideShare, GitHub, Shopify, Zendesk, etc. Even .NET darling Jeff Atwood, co-creator of Stack Overflow, has chosen to use Rails instead of .NET to build the new Discourse forum software. Meanwhile we get to wallow in this beautifully architected .NET Community Server forum.

    I'm not even a Rails developer, nor do I hate .NET, but I'm not willfully ignorant to the fact that Rails is a huge success just because it's isn't the platform I develop for.

    You see there's actually two different technologies called ASP.NET. One, ASP.NET MVC, is a pretty good platform for developing on the web (although the latest version seems to be going down the "do everything with models" route, which is pretty much negating MVC entirely). The other, WebForms, is pretty much the point'n'click hellspawn of the web development world.

    Guess which one Community Server's written in.


  • Considered Harmful

    @morbiuswilters said:

    less delicious

    We'll have to agree to disagree.


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