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Comment by dzonga | Hacker News Reader

something to note DHH is a beast. MSRK seems most of MSRK was written by him alone - https://github.com/mrsked/mrsk/commits/main?after=83dc82661b...

his output is crazy. that's why he gets the big bucks

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This is a great point, and something that I think of often as someone who has been building rails apps for almost 20 years.

Once MSRK has gotten "good enough" for whatever Basecamp needs and DHH has moved on, how many other folks with the dedication and skills will help take over when maintenance and weird edge cases surface?

So far the rails community has been strong enough where this _usually_ isn't an issue, but it definitely is a real concern. You can see the impact of this in some of the recent asset bundling solutions DHH spiked out and then mostly left to the community, where things like js-bundling and css-bundling are close but not completely solid for a bunch of use cases.

I mean isn’t that most open source software? Company releases a tool but only maintains it for themselves, sometimes working with the community to update it.

Sticking with a technology for a long period of time pays the dividend of being able to crank out stuff like its a reflex. I get that DHH created Rails framework so he is intimately knowledgeable but this concept of sticking with and going deep on a tech stack will be much better for someone's career than hopping to whatever fad is trending.

I've always been fascinated with DHH. On top of his programming skills, and CTO of Basecamp, he drives the prototype class in the World Endurance Championship. Absolute beast.

I think what’s more shocking is they were still using Capistrano for the past ~17 years.

https://world.hey.com/dhh/introducing-mrsk-9330a267

I sorely missed Capistrano all these years I moved off rails. The closest the elixir ecosystem had to it (that I found) was edeliver.

So why fix something that ain’t broken?

Interestingly there has been a resurgence of the Capistrano approach in the PHP community with ansistrano: https://github.com/ansistrano/deploy

That’s Capistrano v2 implemented in Ansible. Honestly been tempted just to try it on a side project for fun.

At my work we use Capistrano for PHP projects. It does not matter in which language project is written. You can still use ruby Capistrano and it works good enough

It's 2K lines of code and another 2K tests.

What does the loc tell you?

That you can go and read through the code in about 5 minutes and see that the only thing special about it is the name of the author.

I don't get why HN is going crazy about this. Please tell me if I am missing something obvious.

Because it flies directly in the face of the "cloud everything" or "kubernetes cultism" that seem prevalent. It's a change, basically.

> "cloud everything" or "kubernetes cultism" that seem prevalent.

Not here? To me, general sentiment on news.yc has been anti cloud / k8s for at least 5 years, if not more.

I am guessing that a lot of people who entered the industry since big cloud was a thing never learnt the basics of how to deploy on servers, so these 2000 lines of code are absolutely magic to them.

Personally I use a ~200 line shell script + docker to deploy self hosted apps on a cheap office computer that lives under my desk.

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