Randall Degges
rdegges.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2011
Randall Degges, a developer and former Heroku and Okta employee, writes about APIs, authentication, services, and developer productivity.
What HN saysHN links it for his contrarian 'Why I Love Basic Auth' post and his Heroku writing, and commenters mention him in Heroku discussions.
56HN people shared it
9linked it in comments
111stories submitted
2.6Kstory points
5 months agolast shared
2011people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Why I love basic auth (2015)7 people · 29 points · first shared 2016 · 5 comments on HN
- 2Heroku Isn't for Idiots: developer time and comparative advantage4 people · 356 points · first shared 2012 · 69 comments on HN
- 3Please Stop Using Local Storage3 people · 63 points · first shared 2018 · 8 comments on HN
- 4Sacrifice3 people · 59 points · first shared 2013 · 9 comments on HN
- 5Service Oriented Side Effects3 people · 41 points · first shared 2012 · 9 comments on HN
- 6Service Oriented Problems3 people · 41 points · first shared 2012 · 16 comments on HN
- 7How I Learned to Program2 people · 174 points · first shared 2012 · 73 comments on HN
- 8Caller ID Made Simple2 people · 152 points · first shared 2012 · 64 comments on HN
- 9On Programming Deadlines2 people · 69 points · first shared 2011 · 22 comments on HN
- 10DevOps Django - The Heroku Way2 people · 44 points · first shared 2011 · 11 comments on HN
- 11How to Have Fun Programming2 people · 24 points · first shared 2012 · 6 comments on HN
- 12Deploying Django2 people · 15 points · first shared 2011 · 2 comments on HN
- 13Why I Love Basic Auth2 people · 13 points · first shared 2015 · 1 comments on HN
- 14I Don't Give a Shit About Licensing2 people · 11 points · first shared 2016 · 1 comments on HN
- 15Obsessing Over Availability Is Dumb2 people · 9 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
rdegges · 2022-08-25
Sad day, indeed.
I remember meeting @craigkerstiens through Heroku -- I started using it back when they first released a beta Python buildpack. I also made friends with a ton of amazing people over the years through Heroku. It was a magical company with amazing engineers.
Over the years I've written a lot about Heroku on my blog (https://www.rdegges.com/), and even wrote a book on Heroku many years ago (https://www.theherokuhackersguide.com/), which really helped improve my technical writing chops, and got me into the public eye.
RIP Heroku
zimpenfish · 2016-11-03
As a counterpoint, https://www.rdegges.com/2015/why-i-love-basic-auth/
mmcclellan · 2015-10-23
For fun: Why I Love Basic Auth:
http://www.rdegges.com/why-i-love-basic-auth/
wpietri · 2014-02-17
Great writeup. I really appreciate when people take the time to do this. And also to risk dealing with the jackass criticism that usually comes from putting yourself out there on the internet.
One thing that was underemphasized: They built in response to actual need, which was great. If you click through to the announcement post [1], he explains that he had spent 4 years doing telephony stuff, and was always bothered by the lack of an API.
Good for them for taking their small proof of need and building small. And then using that to get more proof of need as a way to justify further investment. That's in contrast to a classic startup mistake, which is to jump in and build something you just think other people need.
[1] http://www.rdegges.com/im-working-on-a-startup/
machbio · 2020-06-11
dont know whether the facebook bots execute javascript - https://www.rdegges.com/2017/how-to-monetize-your-website-with-cryptoc…
peterdm · 2019-07-21
Upvoted. This is how Postgres supports "fuzzy searching" which helps with misspellings. https://www.rdegges.com/2013/easy-fuzzy-text-searching-with-postgresql…
Completion response-time will be slower than Solr, Elasticsearch, Algolia, etc... but if you're already running Postgres, this may be the fastest to deliver for you.
hazz99 · 2018-11-05
Postgres can definitely do fuzzy matches!
[0] https://www.rdegges.com/2013/easy-fuzzy-text-searching-with-postgresql…
jonathan-kosgei · 2018-07-02
Here's the article mentioned; https://www.rdegges.com/2018/to-30-billion-and-beyond/
streeter · 2012-03-07
Environment variables work extremely well when deploying on Heroku [1]. You can't exactly commit a local_settings.py file to your repo, so setting env variables is the only way to exclude sensitive keys and passwords from your source control.
[1] http://rdegges.com/devops-django-part-3-the-heroku-way