[betteryet]

Back in the day, Heroku, Stripe, and GitHub were iconic engineering organizations. They had this culture rooted in Unix ethos with a sprinkle of modern minimalism and style that was outstanding. You could really see people give a damn in the careful design and polish of their APIs, docs, primitives, and overall output.

Now Heroku and GitHub have been gutted in spirit by their acquirers, which is such a damn shame for our field. We still have Stripe and Apple to some extent, and maybe some new places, but I personally feel a real sense of loss from Heroku and GitHub exiting their status as places you could admire.

[trvz]

Amongst the people opting for just plain Linux servers Linode was the big name back then. They later got supplanted by DigitalOcean, and both are of course also run into the ground by now.

[bjt]

Digital Ocean is run into the ground? I've been with them for a long time and recently just launched new stuff. Still a pretty nice experience and a pretty decent price.