I have been a long time fan of Heroku. In fact, I wrote a blog post all the way back in 2009 about why I thought Heroku was a game changer.

Well, the game has been changed and Platforms as Services now abound. Heroku has gone from burgeoning startup to established player. So established, in fact, that they now have their very own Partners program.

What’s a Heroku Partner? It is a hand picked service provider that is knowledgeable about the Heroku platform. Having deployed Rack, Sinatra, Rails, and Node.js applications to Heroku makes me a natural fit.

Happily, Object Lateral’s application for partnership was accepted and we’re now officially part of the program.

It also looks like we’re the first one in the region. Not too shabby!

The Proverbs say that a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, so I was quite excited when I obtained ObjectLateral.com from the gracious guys at Bocoup.

What does it mean? Nothing concrete, that’s for sure.

It’s a combination of Object Literal (a foundational building block in object-oriented software) and Lateral thinking (solving problems using creative or indirect approaches).

I came up with this name on my own, but I was not the first one.

Back in 2009, Rick Waldron and Boaz Sender wrote an entire joke library called ObjectLateral.js after a fortunate typo in the jQuery Conf program (Boaz has the details here).

It just so happens that I had met Boaz and Rick at another jQuery Conference. When I realized it was them that owned the domain and that it was no longer in use, I reached out to see if I could buy it from them.

Boaz and Rick refused to sell it to me. They insisted on gifting it to me! How awesome is that?

The spirit of ObjectLateral.js lives on at its new home: http://boazsender.github.com/ObjectLateralJS/