Rails Needs New Governance
davidcel.is
davidcel.is
> If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space, he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.
And that's a tweet that DHH agrees with enough to link to in https://world.hey.com/dhh/as-i-remember-london-e7d38e64 with the following commentary:
> Most recently, five officers(!) came to arrest comedian Graham Linehan for illicit tweets. When much of the media reports a story like this, it's often without citing the specific words in question, such that the reader might imagine something far worse than what was actually said. So you should actually read the three tweets that landed Linehan in jail, and earned him a legal restraining order against using X. It's grotesque.
And while I support everyone's right to boycott personalities that they disagree with, I dislike when that turns into a paternalistic crusade against those people through peer pressuring away anyone involved with them. Shaming other people into doing what you feel is the right thing is equally harmful, in my humble opinion, to whatever harm these personalities might effect onto the wider internet.
Trying to force the creator of Rails out because he is too centrist is insane.
However, I clicked two of those blog links and the second one, on "consent culture" has genuinely upset me a little. And I am personally in no way deviant from his ideal norm, nuclear family with 3 kids. But the underlying message about cultural force "guiding people to the good life" fuck that, that's taking away choice, who is to say what the good life is. And calling having kids divine joy: I love my kids but that phrasing gives me the chills.
I've only previously read business and tech stuff from dhh and then rarely. That does make me reassess him, I'll probably skip reading any commentary from him now.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Barrack Obama said something similar about children. I do know he called his children the “Great joy of his life”.
Kids are hard work, and they aren't a joy or a gift to everyone. When someone like DHH, who had the resources to take some of the grind of parenthood away, expounds having kids it doesn't come with "and I'll be sharing my wealth to make it easier"
He also seems to have been a strong advocate for parental leave laws and other structural changes to make it easier to raise children.
Edit: Just for clarity, I have used a lot more than ruby outside of work.
Yes you should be branching out. Politics has nothing to do with why.
The value you bring to a company should be more than your knowledge of a specific syntax and ecosystem. You get paid to solve problems with computers, strive for that.
I don’t follow why a difference in politics affects engineering quality.
Rails IS FREE TO USE. If you want to improve test driven development, do the work yourself. Or start a company and dedicate 40% of your extremely well paid engineers time open source code others can use for free.
37signals and Shopify make the decisions because THEY DO THE WORK. I am happy to sit back and free load off of their contributions even if I disagree with DHH and Tobi's political opinions.
I was never into Rails (got sucked into Django too early) but I did hang out with the Rails community an awful lot in the beginning.
There was a pretty large migration of diverse communities to Rails in the late 2000s / early 2010s, and they were often of really different mindsets. You had the domain-driven thoughtsworky people, the 37signals-influenced folks, and all sorts of in-betweens and outliers. Rails also influenced how programming communities developed in general; prior to that community, my main "community experiences" involved getting flamed on alt.lang.perl and whatever crusty newsgroups were related to C++.
For a while I was very certain Python had "lost" the web to Rails and Node.
Anyhow, I'm saying all this partially to reflect, and partially because I think there's a great opportunity for another migration. I'm wondering how many of these folks have considered migrating to Elixir; from what I have experienced, the technology is great and has lots of potential, and the community around it feels positive and enterprising.
While I understand that railing (intentional pun) on DHH and Shopify can feel cathartic, at this point it seems helpful to move on for multiple reasons, and the spirit of Elixir feels similar to the spirit of Rails.
I don't agree with him on political matters but that is irrelevant. He's not my senator, he runs an open source project (and does it really well).
This is like the fallacy of marketers who only measure slight short-term increases in engagement. It's not success if you get a temporary bump of 5% if you also end up pissing off a ton of people who will never come back. Eventually the whole thing craters.
If you disagree with things he’s done with Rails that’s one thing. But I would strongly suggest you reconsider the notion that he should be removed from leadership on Rails because of all his personal beliefs.
He’s writing a web framework man (along with thousands of other people who may or not agree with him), he’s not directing your personal life. You should strongly reconsider this blog post. One day, the same sort of ire you’re pointing at him will be pointed at you for no reason other than people disagree with you.
It’s a lot easier to stir up trouble than it is to take responsibility and create something better.
You can fork Rails, create whatever system you want for the leadership and strictly control that there is no rudeness. (from your point of view)
Have a better vision for the code and where it will go next.
Create something much better than any rude anti-intellectual right winger can do.
Right?
I don't know if it's too late for Rails itself to be saved, but we need a robust Ruby ecosystem entirely removed from the RoR framework and we need it yesterday.
Sure dont let one person dominate the discussion though, if indeed he is.
Also noticed some of the hyperlinks are not good summaries of the linked thing. That is all I can say as dont want to start tangent, see if you agree.
The article - outside of vague alignment with public figures and a few controversial blog posts - doesn't make any technical points.
DHH isn't a great architect. he was a yung feller with okay ideas. most of those ideas suck in the grand scheme of time.
with modern tooling, the general direction is more confusion than time saving (rails's original major goal)
>...posts from DHH covering a range of far-right talking points... all the way to outright nationalism
which links to DHH saying he's proud to be Danish https://world.hey.com/dhh/national-pride-f7aa1e92
The horror!
There is absolutely nothing in the way of technical analysis or suggestions and the post even ends admitting that the author doesn't believe there's a tractable way forward.
What was the point of this? You don't personally like DHH? I believe everyone is entitled to their opinion but I don't think this article rises anywhere near a level that could be debated. I can only say "I'm sorry you feel that way."
- Trans people
- Fat people
- People who identify as neurodivergent
And plenty more. Rails governance isn't about reviewing PRs, it's about managing people. And if you show outright disdain (if not hate) for many of those people, how is that affecting your ability to drive the project forward? How much harm are you inflicting on the organization?
This isn't Brendan Eich quietly donating to the Prop 8 campaign, this is much louder. He has an audience. Should I ignore what politicians say on their personal Twitter? Would you trust a school superintendent who posted the same things on their personal blog? I know I certainly wouldn't, and I don't know why an open source project leader would be held to some alternative standard that imagines their role as a purely technical one.
That's a big claim for a volunteer project.
> how is that affecting your ability to drive the project forward?
Then the article should have focused on this point. If there is data to be exposed then I'm interested. So far I've only seen catty allegations with nothing concrete to back them up.
> This isn't Brendan Eich quietly donating to the Prop 8 campaign
I similarly don't care. If you simply cannot contribute to a project because you cannot agree with every single decision of it's maintainer then I think you should evaluate your own emotions before attacking others.
> some alternative standard that imagines their role as a purely technical one.
When did this purported standard become recognized or defined? I'm continuing to see a lack of evidence for these claims.
So what?
If you're upset with his takes, that's on you to manage your own emotions accordingly.
Are rails contributors required to read DHH's blogs and signal their agreement before a patch is accepted? Then what is "active" about this?
Speaking of workplace standards, if your boss publishes a personal blog you don't like, what is HR going to do for you other than tell you to stop reading it?