I hate the tendency of social networks to amplify controversy without much context. No doubt this post will attract supposition about what happened and belly aching about Rails. But it’s just an annoying hack of human psyche that we want to rubber neck whatever train wreck is ongoing, yet we probably have deep, complicated issues in our own lives that need attention, and we can’t even debug those. Somehow we think we can voyeuristically understand and judge this situation from afar.
You may have a network issue. The first suggestion you'd find on Google would be to restart your router!
>Linking tweets like this is not really helpful to building an understanding of the issue for outsiders.
The tweet threads in question have exactly the context needed to understand part of the reason why someone resigned in the GitHub thread, from someone who isn't anonymous in the rails community, unlike my hn account.
I could copy paste them into a Medium article but I had linked them because they are informative regardless of your opinion on Twitter as a medium.
No, twitter's frontend code is garbage. It routinely does this (at least on Firefox), and -sometimes- works on a refresh or a hard refresh. It's been this way for years.
Regardless if something is really serious, then compile the relevant/important stuff into a blogpost instead of making people wade through random tweets.
"A quick Google would recommend you turn router on and off again."
It's not a router issue, but thank you for assuming that I am unable to do basic internet searching. I have debugged this issue in the past as it occasionally occurs (for specific tweets only, twitter itself works well), and my conclusion is it's something on twitter's end.
"Why don't you do that if it's so necessary?"
I'm not the one submitting this on HN, am I? If I were, I wouldn't have linked random tweets. I wouldn't be tasking the commenters to compile the information into a usable format for me.
There's nothing actionable here, this just looks like some tuesday morning drama.
I don’t know what’s going on and, at this point, I don’t really want to.
In the past I mostly used Rails for quick proof of concept apps and also for teaching younger kids about web development at one point.
Rails itself has been fine, but there’s something about the community and atmosphere around it that is always steeped in unnecessary drama. This was especially problematic when I was introducing younger people to web dev and their first exposure was full of Twitter drama and the DHH controversy of the month. By now, I’m just so tired of it that I want nothing to do with Rails. It’s unfortunate.
I have no doubt that these individuals who resigned did great things and will be extremely valuable wherever they end up. I also don’t doubt that they had valid reasons to resign. I hope they find a better place to operate.
Drama is bound to happen for a project that lots of people deeply care about. But this drama has never affected those of us who use Rails full-time and professionally, especially me. To be frank, you mentioned in a later reply: "I haven’t done web dev for a very long time" so your comment does sound like an overreaction.
I have used rails since 1.0 days and the drama has never affected my ability to ship. It is not as if DHH is posting dick pics to the edge rails guides. Don’t follow him on twitter and don’t read his blog and you would be none the wiser about his views.
Edit: I realized me posting this under your comment seems a bit belligerent. Not meant as such I just identified with your position of using it for work
It might not affect the day to day, but with this many senior community members speaking up over the years, and leaving Ruby/Rails, I have to imagine it has stunted the growth and progression of the ecosystem.
When I look s as t the transformation that has happened to Python/Django over the last 10 years, compared to Rails, it does feel like it might be the case, although that’s my biased personal point of view.
There's a lot of different options at different levels of maturity, but fundamentally yes there are options that work well. I also wouldn't necessarily call Bundler a gold-standard dependency management solution, it's good but lacks more advanced features necessary for reproducible builds.
>Don’t follow him on twitter and don’t read his blog and you would be none the wiser about his views.
I think that become easier as you age, but in the context of grand parents, new dev are bound to use social media and forums for help and info. And these drama will likely have an negative effect on them.
What? I've used Rails professionally for over a decade and you'd be hard-pressed to find a better framework for web dev that maximises productivity to get to a working product you can earn money from. You don't need to be involved with the Twitter aspect at all to benefit from the great aspects of Ruby and Rails.
I firmly believed that as well, right up until I learned that the broader web dev world wasn’t as difficult, slow, or unproductive as the Rails world had tried to convince me it was. I haven’t done web dev for a very long time but I still don’t have any issues dropping into modern non-Rails frameworks and being productive.
> You don't need to be involved with the Twitter aspect at all.
It’s possible, yes, but the drama has become so pervasive that it’s going to come across your feeds and daily conversations even if you don’t want to see it. It raises questions about the future of the project when it’s so bad that multiple core developers are resigning over it. But most importantly: This level of drama doesn’t exist in most other projects. Yes, there is always some drama and conflict, but something about Rails takes it to the next level.
I've been using rails more or less since 2014 and while there are other options for sure, nothing is quite as nice as rails in my opinion.
I honestly have never heard about any of this drama. I never really pay attention to any of that stuff and it never has affected me or my rails projects in any noticeable way.
The community and ecosystem of any PL or framework is an important consideration for people needing to interact with that ecosystem in a long term way when pushing improvements or working with those in charge of governance.
A lot of people have loved rails as a project, but found important people in the community unprofessional for years - it's hard to want to invest in projects like that especially if its comparative advantage is claimed to be productivity.
The drama sucks, but I feel like there's drama in almost every dev community. I mostly just don't pay attention to any of it, because it doesn't affect my day to day usage of something like Rails.
Not a rails person at all, but I could easily imagine rails being closer to a perfect storm than most other dev communities, with its unique intersection of tech deep-divers who reach their personal "peak surface" in rails and who might very well follow a torvaldseque "I don't care about the social, it's the technology that matters" and the socialiteism of more content/design minded people who reach their "peak tech" in rails. In my perception, creating a bridge between those two poles is basically what makes rails special. That's "rails' superpower". And with great power, well, perhaps in this case great drama?
When I got introduced to web development, through Rails, the drama of the day was probably turbolinks. I learnt from our instructor that many people hated it, and we promptly removed the turbolinks gem from the gemfile every time we initialised a new project. I was far too new to go dig up controversies. I regarded names such as DHH, Matz, _why, Aaron Patterson, Jeremy Ashkenas, or Sandi Metz as so infinitely smarter than me, that I could not even begin to comprehend them directly.
I'm saying all this to point out that when someone is introduced to web development, they are often so awed, humbled and overwhelmed that twitter dramas are far from their minds.
Recently there has been some unfortunate drama with Basecamp and DHH but has the community and atmosphere around Rails always been "steeped in unnecessary drama"?
The only consistent unnecessary drama I've seen is that whenever Rails (or Ruby) get brought up on HN the conversation ends up beating the same dead horse about performance or "scalability".
> Recently there has been some unfortunate drama with Basecamp and DHH but has the community and atmosphere around Rails always been “steeped in unnecessary drama”?
I haven’t been engaged in the Ruby/Rails communities for quite some time, but, yes, way back when I was, that was a key distinguishing feature between the Rails community and the non-Rails-focussed Ruby community; the Rails community was full of drama.
I spent 30 minutes investigating this mystery as well, and the best I could arrive at is that this has something to do with politics but no one actually wants to expressly describe the exact positions held or why they are naughty.
It's more than one reason, and it's not just political views of the person who really wants to do the keynote. Though the replies to this thread help explain the position many who are leaving are in right now: https://twitter.com/kaspth/status/1499431981830086657
Whether DHH is a dick (he is) or at times a diva, he’s literally none of the things this Twitter account is trying to label him as.
To call him far right is ludicrous, and pretty much the exact absurdity he’s often writing about in regards to people being unable to handle any differences of opinion anymore.
The leap to “you disagree? Nazi!” is why we all need to quit Twitter
I appreciate you trying to be helpful, but I can't make anything out of that twitter link. The only thing I can gather is that maybe DHH tweeted about this developer? Or that DHH worked with this developer but didn't give him the full context of what they were working on together?
Contributors are being publicly brought up in drama posts wherein one of the other main contributors seems to be happy to implode the community in order to continue as a BDFL figure, despite that the community is at near consensus that he doesn't deserve to keep that position as someone who keeps becoming increasingly divisive and whose contributions have grown more minor every year.
Looking at the link and thru the comments here-- seems to be a information-less post that is doing nothing but encouraging rumours (just see the comments here on HN)
As such, I dont know how/why this is on the front page.
I'll try to summarize what I know about the reasons and what brought people to resign from the Rails project, for those missing the context. Please note that I might be partially wrong, but I'll try to summarize as neutrally as I can:
- DHH, the cofounder of Basecamp and creator of Rails serves as the de facto benevolent dictator of Rails.
- April 2021: Basecamp announces that discussions around politics and society are no longer allowed at the company.
The official statement was that employees should not feel pressured to take on side or the other, and that discussions would derail into flamewars. Employees instead suspected that the announcement was made because some employees found a list of "funny customer names", that had been circulating since 2009, offensive. It apparently contained mostly Asian and African names, and led to discussions about inclusion and diversity. About a third of the employees of Basecamp quit the company. [1]
- April 2021 to March 2022: The story of Basecamp leads to many many discussions on Twitter and in blogs. DHH turns off the comments on his Twitter. People start doubting the fitness of DHH to lead the Rails project. There are flame wars from both sides. People start to turn their back on Rails. After multiple tweets, people start accusing DHH of being a cryptobro and QAnon sympathizer.
- March 2022: DHH published a blog post containing an email from the RailsConf organizers, where they tell him that they want to fill the keynote spot at Railsconf with other speakers, because he had "mostly been offline for the past year". DHH had been very active in reality, publishing code to Rails consistently. He lists his contributions, along with the other contributors of those features (among them: Kasper Timm Hansen, author of the PR linked in this post). DHH suspects that he was uninvited for political reasons and his stance on diversity. [2]
Kasper Timm Hansen tweeted, back in August 2021, that DHH was credited for work Kasper did [3]. That last blog post of DHH seems to have broken the camels back.
I don't believe a keynote speech has to be delivered by the founder of the language or framework. The founder can still deliver their speech elsewhere in the schedule.
When the Crystal programming language Conference was held in 2021, the organisers asked the Ruby creator ("Matz") to give the keynote speech. I thought that was a lovely gesture from the conference organisers.
Having a different keynote speech (not from the founder) might give the audience an unusual, suprising and even inspirational presentation.
Two made-up examples:
1. Keynote speech: Ruby on Rails: From zero to hero?
Lynsey, a cafe worker, lost her job during the pandemic. During lockdown, she began to learn RoR with no idea where it might lead her. She had never programmed before and found the process complex and maddeningly frustrating - punctured with occasional moments of joy. What did Lynsey learn as a beginner to RoR? And what happened next for Lynsey?
2. Keynote speech from our founder [insert name]
A look back to our successes and progress over the past year. And a look forward to the future.
Hard to say. If the expert has something informative, I'd probably rather read it at my own pace. The newbiew might be more inspirational, or point out flaws that everyone steeped in the system aren't aware of, or otherwise be more interesting. Depends on the people.
> Kasper Timm Hansen tweeted, back in August 2021, that DHH was credited for work Kasper did [3].
That tweet and its two self replies say:
>> If someone on your team isn't giving you full context, to the best of their ability and the situation, they're not collaborating; they're negotiating on their behalf using you and your expertise as leverage.
>> The experience feels like being unwittingly made to shoe shop for an elephant. They present you shoe after shoe, keeping you in the dark and thus draining you. Instead of just saying who they're shopping for, so you could say "oh an elephant doesn't need shoes at all"
>> It's about controlling you, so they get to crack the problem by themselves and get the accolades etc., as opposed to solving the problem through collaboration so you both win.
Is there more context needed to understand this? I would never have guessed just from those tweets that it is about a mis-crediting issue.
Is there any proof of him being a cryptobro qanon type? It sounds like a weird mix of buzzwords, I've been following the qanon lunacy for a while and the overlap with the crypto community is basically 0, unless we are talking about esoteric cryptos or cultish crypto like ripple.
No, for decades DHH was almost obnoxiously pretty far left.
That he is now being labeled a nazi for saying we went too far with masks and that crypto might have a use after all because the ability for government to cut off all your money with no recourse is dangerous for society… it’s absurd and pretty much exactly what he often complains about now
The trucker protest has absolutely nothing to do with qanon, but I guess that proves he does support crypto for a specific use case. Being against emergency measures and doing away with due process for freezing accounts is hardly something very extremist imo.
Let me just say that, as someone who lives in Ottawa, that his takes on the convoy occupation are complete bullshit.
The fact that he describes it as "just three weeks of honking, blocked streets and bridges, bouncy castles and flag waving", then refers to the response being "shockingly authoritarian" and "martial law" is a sign that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
To be fair, the emergency measures are our own version of martial law. Like there is no martial law in canada and if we went into a state of war, the law that would be invoked would be the exact same act. Don't forget, the emergency act was the direct replacement of the previous war measures act!
And to be honest, I have my opinion on the protest and I'll probably disagree with you on whether even what you described justified such an unprecetended response by the government ( i dont think it even happened once in the past 50 years for a western government to suspend it's own constitutional rights, even over much more violent or disruptive event). Though I still get your point!
But I think it's still very unreasonable to say he's a qanon supporter type because of his opinion on the ottawa protest, don't you agree? Like those are massively different things, and even if you agree with how trudeau handled the events it's very reasonable to think that such a controversial move might result in disagreements without being a completely insane cultist like the qanon believers usually are?
Not to mention it's a very american centric accusation anyways.
They're not 'our version of martial law' because the term 'martial law' has a specific meaning, about suspending civil rights and putting the military in charge of civil security. The Emergencies Act does neither, and indeed no law in Canada allows the government to suspend the Charter.
You're right that we may disagree on some details, but I think where we'll agree is that this should not have been a situation that required a federal emergency. I fully believe this could have been handled just fine at the municipal level and, failing that, provincial level, and should not have required a federal response.
The way I see it the real emergency was that the Ottawa Police and then the Ontario government were spectacular failures, and this created a scenario where, I believe, the federal government was entirely justified in enacting the Emergencies Act and the mandates they did.
But regardless of whether it should have been invoked, what happened was not 'martial law' nor would I call it 'shockingly totalitarian', and that's why I said DHH's hot takes were bullshit.
Written that way, it seems the fault is on the Internet. I'm more inclined to believe the fault is on the people... but of course, this doesn't change the facts.
The blog post DHH made also listed mostly work that he wasn't the primary contributor to (one of his contributions was primarily done by someone who left the community because of him!), and that didn't go over well.
As he escalates the drama he is largely seen as creating, people who have no interest in drama are leaving.
That's why I wrote both what the email from RailsConf said, and how he interpreted it. But I agree that my wording about his interpretation was a bit unfortunate.
> As he escalates the drama he is largely seen as creating, people who have no interest in drama are leaving.
I've been a Rails dev for about 10 years, and I've always got the feeling that DHH very much enjoys drama, and purposefully stokes it and then escalates it. It's very much been a pattern for him. I tend to just ignore him these days, because whatever drama he's currently stoking usually has very little to do with my day to day usage of Rails.
I'm on the other hand under the impression that a lot of drama he creates is quite spot-on. A bit like Steve Jobs. Inconvenient thruths originating from a certain shrewdness.
He was not uninvited. He was simply asked to share the keynote with other people. Not an unreasonable request given how large the Rails community is.
> because he had "mostly been offline for the past year"
While poorly worded and not accurate (I assume they refer to him not engaging on Twitter or perhaps lack of communication with the Railsconf-people, but yeah he has clearly been online) this is not the reason for him being asked to share the keynote. The email says the committee has made the decision while him being offline, there is no reasoning given for it beyond just having more people doing the keynote than him.
> He was not uninvited. He was simply asked to share the keynote with other people.
That's why I wrote both what the email from RailsConf said, and how he interpreted it. I agree though that my wording of his interpretation was a bit bad.
Can someone provide more context please. All I see are pull requests as resignations with little additional description. I don't see how we can have a meaningful discussion around that.
Thankfully it appears to not be on the frontpage anymore. This feels like average twitter drama and not something that belongs on HN. Without concrete points there's nothing to really discuss other than speculate on what caused this particular drama.
I would rather see a post about the new thing that someone leaving a particular coding community is choosing instead. That would be constructive and positive. What's better? That's what we need to hear.
This being Basecamp (of which DHH is CTO) issuing a "no politics" guideline, which was inevitably interpreted using the prevailing ideology of "if you're not with us you're against us".
Been in this situation at a startup company.
I refused to talk politics, only business. Which has been my policy for 20 years.
This created a huge backlash against me, eventually I had to leave.
> issuing a "no politics" guideline, which was inevitably interpreted using the prevailing ideology of "if you're not with us you're against us".
There is a lot more to the story than this. If you want to know more about what happened in May 2021 and the events leading up to that, there is no shortage of information about it. It was well covered at the time, even by Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/agnesuhereczky/2021/05/09/why-d...
I just searched for "Basecamp Diversity Program" and this was the first thing that popped up. I am not inside of this community, but I've been a Rails user for literally hundreds of years. (And every year it seems like we're hearing again about how the community is really drama-free, from now on, no-takebacks...)
The context for me is that the employees at Basecamp apparently cared more about a company-wide diversity and inclusion program than the founders, and when rubber met road (and the severance packages came out) they were willing to quit over it. Then, 8 or 9 months later, DHH publicly took both sides on a divisive issue, and everyone who was barely involved in the conversation (myself included) thought "hey, this must be the driver for $currentDrama."
When really, it seems to have been DHH driving the drama all along. I mean, just look at the No RailsConf blog post. I mean really critically look at it. What small, narrow "opportunity for drama" was in this simple e-mail from the program committee, and yet here we are again, discussing it on a front-page HN post.
DHH did that.
And I'm guessing that RubyCentral program committee decided there was practically zero chance that DHH would not take his opportunity on stage to say something provocative or divisive, but I'm not on the program committee so really this is where my actual real effective insight level approaches the zero limit.
I'm not taking sides, but I hate the perception that Ruby community is always full of drama. Now I'm hoping that geo-political and pandemic issues can subside for long enough to go to RailsConf, looking forward to a different keynote speaker, (and I'm sure there will be absolutely no drama of any kind!)
