James Lindenbaum

RailsConf starts tomorrow and Heroku will be there in full force. Here’s our line up:

Monday, 1:30pm — A Hat Full of Tricks with Sinatra

Our very own Blake Mizerany, the creator of Sinatra, is giving a tutorial on Sinatra. Ryan Tomayko will be on hand as well.

Tuesday, 1:50pm — The Future of Deployment: A Killer Panel

Join me as I moderate a panel on deployment, with a truly killer group: Marc-André Cournoyer (creator …

When Adam, Orion, and I started Heroku two years ago, we had no idea how much new technology we would have to build to realize our vision of an instant platform for Ruby that just works.

Luckily, we were able to attract an amazing team to work on this problem with us, and the team has really shaped Heroku into the offering it is today. We’re currently by far the fastest and easiest deployment …

2008 was a very, very big year for Heroku. We launched the first version of the platform, picked up some world-class investors, expanded the team with some amazing talent (there are 10 of us now), spoke at a zillion conferences about Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, the web stack, and cloud computing, and have grown like crazy.

Private Beta

Most importantly, we’ve had an incredibly successful private beta. We launched it less than a year ago, and …

We are happy this morning to announce we’ve raised a $3 million round of funding, from Redpoint Ventures and some other great investors.

Adam, Orion, and I started Heroku with the goal of making software development much easier and more accessible. We’ve got big plans – what we’ve done so far is really just the first step. There is so much we’ve been dying to do, but we just haven’t had the capacity.

This investment …

If you’re curious about our vision for Heroku, check out the latest episode of the Ruby on Rails Podcast. We spoke with Geoffrey Grosenbach about our plans for Heroku, the Rails ecosystem, and some good old fashioned economics.

What about gems, plugins, and different Rails versions?

We are definitely going to support gems and plugins. We are almost finished with a slick gem and plugin installer you can use for each app. In the meantime, you can install plugins by importing or uploading the files directly into vendor/plugins.

Currently, we only support the latest stable version of Rails. You can use a different version by uploading a frozen vendor/rails, but this may not …

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 …

A couple of weeks ago we quietly started accepting signups for our private beta. We knew people would be excited about Heroku; I mean, we’re pretty excited about it. Word seems to have gotten out, as over the last several days well over 1,000 people have signed up.

We are inviting users off the waiting list all day, every day, as fast as we can. So we’re also receiving a constant stream now of feedback …