Comment by drita | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drita | Hacker News Reader

>Now, I’m not on the RailsConf committee this year, but I have been on it in the past. I was on it the year that we decided not to make David Hanemeier-Hansson[1], original committer to Rails, the keynote speaker for the first time in sixteen years. That guy melted down in this giant blog post that echoed throughout the halls of the online tech bro cafeteria for weeks.

David Heinemeier-Hansson wasn't the "original committer to Rails". He built the first version of Rails entirely on his own. As he's known to be quite opinionated and harsh in his tone, I read the "melt down" that was mentioned here and I really don't think it reads in that tone at all[2]. While I did find the article here quite interesting and do share some of the sentiment regarding tech conferences, I find this paragraph quite disingenuous.

[1] Misspelling by author

[2] https://world.hey.com/dhh/no-railsconf-faa7935e

I agree it’s a weird way to minimize his role, a sort of rewriting of history, for the same political reasons he was not invited to speak (also for false reasons).

It is a shame that many people who claim to support diversity and tolerance actually have no interest in it.

I read the whole thing and I have no idea whats going on. The post starts reminiscing the work of the year. Common end of the year post. Then an email is presented in which the conf people just say they are looking for other options. The only reason given is that they were "offline" a lot. (btw, what does that mean? Isn't git history being online?) And then the author starts giving a "I hate woke culture" speech. This reads like a GPT output with ctx=potato. I am definitely missing something.

Was this incident the catalist for Rails World[0]?

https://rubyonrails.org/2023/4/6/rails-world-is-coming

I wouldn't call it a meltdown. The committee was doubtless in a tough spot and DHH is almost certainly not wrong that the decision was political and the email was disingenuous. But there would also have almost certainly been a lot of noise had they gone the other way.

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