I'm leaving Rails core and I'm not interested in being in the alumni
github.com
github.com
Partly in response to tip toeing around this behavior for more than half a decade: https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1499714921726046213
Linking tweets like this is not really helpful to building an understanding of the issue for outsiders.
>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.
Regardless if something is really serious, then compile the relevant/important stuff into a blogpost instead of making people wade through random tweets.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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 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.
I think this is a bit of an overreaction.
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.
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.
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".
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.
At least Rails is consistent in being absolutely obscure to me, even outside the code.
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
https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1499714921726046213
My original suggestion was to look through the reply chains as well, other contributors and users are more concrete.
https://twitter.com/krainboltgreene/status/14994643493242347...
https://twitter.com/ZiggyTheHamster/status/14995381112812584...
As such, I dont know how/why this is on the front page.
- 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.
[1] https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...
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.
---
I know which one I would rather listen to.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
On Internet. It turns out 30 years later, the information super highway just isn't a good fit for discussions.
This is actually a very unpopular opinion on HN as most of HN believe Social Media is the root of all evil.
To be clear, he was never uninvited. He has decided not to go because of a request for a joint keynote.
https://mobile.twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1499714921726...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://images.app.goo.gl/JvyvwdnNi936uhvk8
He's always been like this, if anything has mellowed out. Dunno why people have a problem with it now.
As for his politics, he's still left wing, just in a pragmatic euro way, versus the current zeitgeist in North America...
Anyhow, just more dev drama, just like how people somehow found fault with Matz over the idea that people should be kind and respect each other (!?).
https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/05/basecamp_political_di...
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".
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!)