> Salesforce (classic) is JSF.

Here's a little bit of trivia... The Visualforce framework (that customers can write interactive pages in, and a small minority of the standard UI is build in) is based on JSF, but most of Salesforce classic standard UI is written in a home-grown system that generates HTML described in imperative Java. It's more akin to an HTML generating Tk.

Makes sense and they had a few big architectural changes of their front end. Lighting is unbelievably slow

> the team now functions as an internal infra team for Salesforce

This is definitely false. Though some internal apps are deployed on Heroku, it is not the primary deployment target for new projects. Heroku staff work on Heroku. Salesforce has a large internal infra program and team that has no overlap with Heroku. past codename projects have been proposed to change this, but none have ever come to be.

(Former Herokai) It is definitely not false but you misunderstood what they meant.

You understood it as running sfdc code on Heroku which is not happening—but was proposed as part of Shinrai (a failed project). What has happened is many if not most Heroku employees have moved away from working on Heroku and are now working on Salesforce Functions aka Evergreen.

Since you seem to have some insight into this, I interviewed a former Heroku eng a while back and he said that they deploy Heroku infra on Heroku, essentially dogfooding their own product. I also see a lot of claims that Heroku has essentially stagnated on features. I'm curious how do internal teams reconcile this (do they just work around the stagnation?) and is there a layer that is a choke point for product improvement that also affects to internal teams (if so that would seem demoralizing)?

Most of their attrition is due to the slow rate of product improvements. So yeah, it's demoralizing for sure.

I've heard this as a reason for leaving for almost a decade though so it hasn't been a new problem but it seems to get worse every year.

There are a bunch of internal only feature flags that Herokai use internally. Making internally visible feature flags is less of a political fight than making externally visible features.

Even if the parent comment is wrong, there must be a public relations problem if so many people believe the product to be abandoned.

Periwinkle never materialized. Neither did Shinrai, or a number of other projects that people brought up in hn threads about this incident. It’s clear that Heroku has lost a ton of great talent and momentum due to questionable business decisions but some of the most controversial fail to ever make it past codename status.

It's on ice. As you say it's also not the first time they've attempted something like this.

Eventually they'll get there, but customers should know that's the direction. They'll be users of "Compute Cloud" writing APEX instead of Procfiles someday.

Remember when Salesforce was moving off of Oracle within 2 years? A decade ago..

I wouldn't be surprised if Larry got them CIA/gov't contracts to avoid anything like that happening.