King & McGaw Developers

This week Adam Wiggins announced that he has stepped down as CTO of Heroku to pursue other opportunities.

At Easyart we’re big fans of Heroku (it’s used extensively for our new platform), and Adam’s general approach to modern web software design, so I thought it might be a good opportunity to review some of his nuggets of wisdom.

The Twelve-Factor App

A manifesto for modern web software design and the principles. It’s clearly the concepts from which the Heroku ecosystem is formed, but the principles can be applied to any modern web application platform stack.

My Heroku Values

A few bits and pieces from this post:

Make it real. Ideas are cheap. Make a prototype, sketch a CLI session, draw a wireframe. Discussions around concrete examples, not handy-waving abstractions. Don’t say you did something, provide a URL that proves it.

Ship it. Nothing is real until it’s being used by a real user. This doesn’t mean you make a prototype in the morning and blog about it in the evening. It means you find one person you believe your product will help and try to get them to use it.

Divide and conqueor. Big, hard problems become easy if you cut them into small pieces. How do you eat the elephant? One bite at a time. If a problems seems hard, think about how you can cut it into two smaller, easier problems. If one of those problems is still too hard, cut it in half again.

Throw things away. It’s not the code that is valuable, it’s the understanding you’ve gained from building it.

Decision-making via ownership, not consensus or authority. Every product, feature, software component, web page, business deal, blog post, and so on should have a single owner. Many people may collaborate on it, but the owner is “the buck stops here” and makes the final call on what happens with the owned thing.

It will be interesting to see what he turns his hand to next.