This article was published on May 31, 2013

Heroku co-founder and CTO Adam Wiggins steps down after six years


Heroku co-founder and CTO Adam Wiggins steps down after six years

It looks like we’re not quite done yet with Friday departure news. Heroku founder and CTO Adam Wiggins announced that he will be leaving the cloud application platform company today.

He has not stated what he will be doing in the future nor why he’s leaving. What is known is that he will be partaking in some rest and relaxation and that he’s “definitely not done building things.

For the past six years, Wiggins says that running Heroku has been an “opportunity of a lifetime” and is his life’s work. If you read his post, it’s apparent that Wiggins certainly didn’t want to leave as he does it with “a heavy heart.”

Heroku, a cloud platform that aids in the development of applications, came under fire from customers following a post from the startup, Rap Genius, claiming that the Platform as a Service (PaaS) company changed the way it distributes tasks from Ruby on Rails apps across Amazon EC2 machines that it made available to users over the last three years.

Wiggins took on the charge and published a post that basically apologized for any past or present customers who experienced issues with how its HTTP router works or web performance on the platform.

The company was acquired by Salesforce.com back in 2010 for approximately $250 million in cash. Interestingly, the news comes a day after Heroku launched its platform API in public beta, enabling the platform to be integrated with other services.

His full statement is below:

It’s with a heavy heart that I announce that Friday, May 31 2013 will be my last day at Heroku.

How can I possibly put into words what Heroku has meant to me these last six years? I can say it was a tremendous experience; or the opportunity of a lifetime; or the greatest thing I have ever been a part of. I can say that Heroku has been my life’s work, as I did recently in a public blog post. All of those things are true, but none seem to capture the enormity of what’s transpired these past six years.

I tend to focus on mechanical elements of a company: product, code, design, process. But what has surprised me the most at Heroku is that none of these things is the best part. The best part is the team.

I’ve never had the chance to work with a more singular group of people. Talented, passionate, skilled, dedicated. Most of all, sharing a set of values: elegance, craft, maniacal focus on simplicity; and an uncompromising belief that the future will be made of software, and how that software gets made will shape the future of the world.

The Heroku team is going to continue to achieve great things. I will continue to be a champion for Heroku and all it stands for in my new life as a Heroku alumni.

Photo credit: Sean Gallup/Getty Images

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