I prefer to explicitly call it out, even if I believe this post is a fair summary of the story of Heroku. Are there points you disagree with or that are inaccurate?
It’s well written and interesting, no issues at all imo. Thanks for calling it out; no problem with that. Some people conflate working for a competing tech with bias, and while there could be some, the important thing is to mitigate.
As a contrary example, there’s another Heroku story on the front page right now that’s not interesting or thoughtful at all and is just marketing copy for what they’re selling.
It's a great practice, if there's one nit - it's probably better to put things like that closer to the beginning of the piece so people are less inclined to fish it out of the bottom and use it for messageboard battle.
It's great you disclosed this information, and you wrote an excellent article imo.
I hope it's fair to say that you work for a direct competitor to Heroku, and that the intention of the article is to share how you've learned from the parts of Heroku that people loved and are working to build on these ideas in the work you're doing (which is great!). I'd prefer knowing that the article is written by a competitor at the start versus casually towards the end.
You should just write something like this the first time around because just pasting a random line from the article ends up looking like the sort of thing the guidelines harumph about:
Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
really wouldnt say vercel is a direct competitor to Heroku, insofar as HN is a pretty discerning crew as to how a serverless-only platform differs from one that lets you run servers.
