Goodbye Heroku
For many years, I left this website largely unmaintained, and it continued working just fine. After all, it's primarily a set of static files which should not demand any attention. So, I consider that a win.
Today, however, I underwent a larger maintenance task, and moved this site from Heroku (with a custom Node.js server with Express) to Vercel (with a Next.js backend). Here's looking forward to many more years of zero maintenance.
Why The Move?
My primariy motivation for moving now is that Heroku suffered a security breach, and I am worried that Salesforce isn't going to maintain Heroku very well going forward.
While I was migrating providers, there were several other pain points I wanted to address:
- Support Typescript and React to build more quickly.
- Reduce the overhead of adding a new blog post. (Less markup?)
- Refresh HTTPS certificates automatically via LetsEncrypt
- Deploy quickly and easily
Next.js covers the former two points, and deploying with Vercel covers the latter two. Were there other options? Definitely. I could have used any static site generator and a number of deployment hosts (even including Heroku). This isn't an ad. Next and Vercel seem like they will work with minimal effort and comfortable technologies, though, so I'm going for it.
Cheers!