I'm leaving Rails core and I'm not interested in being in the alumni

https://github.com/rails/website/pull/27

by ksec • 4 years ago

68 86 4 years ago

jaynetics• 4 years ago

Are there internal controversies? Another core member left a few days ago.

Yes. There is a Twitter thread with a large group of Rails contributors chiming in on the related problems: https://twitter.com/kaspth/status/1499431981830086657

ksec5• 4 years ago

And to put things in context, Andrew White and Javan Makhmali resigned as well .

https://github.com/rails/website/pull/28

https://github.com/rails/website/pull/25

TheAceOfHearts• 4 years ago

Could someone please provide a bit more context on why people are leaving?

DetroitThrow10• 4 years ago

Various reasons are brought up in the replies to this thread: https://twitter.com/kaspth/status/1499431981830086657

Partly in response to tip toeing around this behavior for more than half a decade: https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1499714921726046213

palerdot4• 4 years ago

This thread tries to provide better context - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600746

tsm• 4 years ago

Is this related to DHH's blogpost about Railsconf?

afandian• 4 years ago

You mean this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30541345 ?

thematrixturtle• 4 years ago

Which in turn appears to be obliquely refer to this:

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".

DetroitThrow10• 4 years ago

Yes.

MasterScrat• 4 years ago

What happened?

Zealotux• 4 years ago

Completely out of the loop here, I tried reading the "No RailsConf" blog post and now I'm even more confused, could someone please share context?

At least Rails is consistent in being absolutely obscure to me, even outside the code.

bob1029• 4 years ago

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.

DetroitThrow10• 4 years ago

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

palerdot4• 4 years ago

This thread tries to provide better context - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600746

palerdot4• 4 years ago

This thread tries to provide better context - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600746

PragmaticPulp2• 4 years ago

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.

forgingahead• 4 years ago

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.

PragmaticPulp2• 4 years ago

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.

DetroitThrow10• 4 years ago

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.

Trasmatta2• 4 years ago

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.

ksec5• 4 years ago

I cant even record any drama from PHP and Python.

usrusr• 4 years ago

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?

Mikeb852• 4 years ago

And all the drama about Rails is the creator has nuanced political views... Better than most communities.

jmuguy• 4 years ago

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".

dragonwriter• 4 years ago

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.

Axsuul• 4 years ago

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.

nasmorn• 4 years ago

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

game_the0ry• 4 years ago

I can't say I agree with your feelings with the rails community. I always thought it was one of the nicer and more organized ones.

sprkwd2• 4 years ago

Just to reiterate, the Ruby community itself is incredibly lovely.

azangru• 4 years ago

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.

b0afc375b5• 4 years ago

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.

DetroitThrow10• 4 years ago

Perhaps @dang should change the link to this thread: https://twitter.com/kaspth/status/1499431981830086657

gedy• 4 years ago

All these threads seem to talk obliquely about other posts, context, etc and it's not clear to outsiders "what happened".

palerdot4• 4 years ago

This thread has better context - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30600746

softwaredoug• 4 years ago

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.

Lukas_Skywalker3• 4 years ago

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.

[1] https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basec...

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

[3] https://twitter.com/kaspth/status/1431699450594988036

DetroitThrow10• 4 years ago

DHH suspects that he was uninvited for political reasons and his stance on diversity.

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.

Lukas_Skywalker3• 4 years ago

To be clear, he was never uninvited.

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.

Trasmatta2• 4 years ago

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.

sleepyhead2• 4 years ago

DHH suspects that he was uninvite

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.

Lukas_Skywalker3• 4 years ago

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.

mardifoufs3• 4 years ago

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.

DetroitThrow10• 4 years ago

Here's a blog post where he sympathizes with both: https://world.hey.com/dhh/i-was-wrong-we-need-crypto-587ccb0...

jeffbax2• 4 years ago

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

open-source-ux• 4 years ago

Thank you for the additional context.

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.

victor_e2• 4 years ago

I'd rather listen to the expert rather than the newbie for a keynote to be honest. Someone who just learned rails should not be doing the keynote.

tzs• 4 years ago

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.

victor_e2• 4 years ago

That tweet sums up twitter for me. Vague, provocative and a useless analogy

Mikeb852• 4 years ago

Does no one remember DHH's first Rails keynote?

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 (!?).

ezekg• 4 years ago

People have a problem with it because, these days at least, people have a problem with anything that’s wrongthink.

sprkwd2• 4 years ago

It's really hard to monetize being kind and respecting each other.

softwarebeware• 4 years ago

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.

shantnutiwari• 4 years ago

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.

rognjen• 4 years ago

Interestingly he still has core @rails in his profile.

I'm leaving Rails core and I'm not interested in being in the alumni

Related Stories