135 lines
7.7 KiB
Plaintext
135 lines
7.7 KiB
Plaintext
[1]JohanJohan Halse
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[2]GitHub[3]Mastodon[4]GitHub profile[5]Mastodon profile[6]GitHub profile[7]
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Mastodon profile
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2025-09-26David, please stop posting
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Let's be realistic: DHH isn't going anywhere. He owns the trademarks, he
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controls the Rails Foundation, he sits on the board of Shopify, and he doesn't
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give a shit about you. In fact, he seems positively giddy at the idea of people
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being driven away by his occasionally repugnant blog posts and xeets. I'm sure
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he'd very much like an ideologically pure userbase for Rails, the same way he'd
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love for Britain to only contain native brits, wink wink. If that means the
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"Rails community" becomes a small stagnant pool of people getting paid to cheer
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for him and Tobi, that's clearly a price he's willing to pay! He'll be staying
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on, whether you like it or not.
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But be that as it may, I sincerely wish he would just shut up. He has a severe
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case of [8]American Brainworm and like most of that parasite's hosts, he's
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absolutely determined to infect everyone else with their culture war. He
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actually managed to recognize how harmful it was to his own company, and banned
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political discussions as a consequence. But somehow, he has yet to grasp the
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fact that in a bankshot way, everyone working with Rails is working with him at
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their day job, and it's exactly as corrosive to the Ruby community as it was
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inside Basecamp at the time. It's sort of unreal to me that he can't wrap his
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head around that, having gone through what he did and having taken so much
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obvious psychic damage from it. To the best of my kremlinology it seems like he
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views these posts as some fun harmless sport, where he goes off to "[9]annoy
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people on the Internet" as a way of blowing off steam, to then sit back and
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guffaw to himself at how he really pwned the woke-ass SJWs this time, won't
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they get their panties in a twist, haha roflmao pepe the frog meme dot jpeg.
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Then he can't refrain from diving into the backlash and escalating the conflict
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even further. I wish he'd stop. It's unseemly. It's destructive.
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Run me on a need-to-know basis
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I have no idea what political views John Hawthorn, Xavier Noria, Jean Boussier,
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or the rest of the core team hold. You read something from Byroot or Tenderlove
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and it'll be all [10]competence and [11]excellence and sometimes very bad dad
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jokes and I can respect these people for what they do and how they conduct
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themselves both online and in real life. I really don't need to know if they're
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paying members of the Charlie Kirk fanclub, or if they think people with ADHD
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should just stop fidgeting and get over themselves. I don't need them to air
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their grievances with DHH in public, either–I don't know whether they've patted
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him on the back and said "good one" every time he's spat another slimy gob of
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far-right politics at everyone, or whether they've privately told him to please
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stop because they're collateral damage in his tiresome rants. And not knowing
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is a splendid and magnificent thing, because it means we can all project our
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beliefs onto the core team and they can remain paragons of Ruby virtue to
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everyone. [12]Recent events have also shown pretty conclusively that anyone who
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fails to show Dear Leader enough respect will be promptly replaced by some
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AI-assisted Shopify drone. The current economy is heavily tilted towards the
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people holding the bags of money and they're squeezing that for all it's
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worth—I have a lot of sympathy towards people who just want to do their job and
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avoid getting fired because they're not enthusiastic enough towards the mad
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king.
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But I really do think that being a leader and a public figure, in open source
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as well as in a company, comes with a price of admission: it requires some
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goddamn decency. Elementary shit like being able to contain your glee when you
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feel the political winds blowing your way. Not antagonizing others for the
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lulz. Not broadcasting virulent American schisms to the rest of us sorry fucks
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who are already inundated with FAR TOO MUCH OF IT on top of all the mass
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layoffs, AI shenanigans, and russian drone strikes we wake up to every day. If
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you can't extend this kind of basic courtesy to the people who work with you,
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you're just not a good leader. He gets called a fascist and bristles at it, but
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the fact is that he picked each and every one of these fights himself. And
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again, it's mind-bendingly strange how someone like DHH, given his long history
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of [13]telling others to [14]keep it private and [15]not get political, doesn't
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get this. The rest of Rails core seem to understand it perfectly well.
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The deal
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Rails has been a successful project for literally decades now, and with [16]a
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few [17]tweaks it's still a great choice for anyone who wants to build solid
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web applications. Ruby as a language and ecosystem has benefitted tremendously
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from it, too. People can get paid to write in what often looks like magical
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pseudocode, that's a lovely thing, and I believe David's personality was a big
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part of its early success. Going up against what he calls the Merchants of
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Complexity with their onerous but well-funded Java and Microsoft stacks
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required a strong mix of courage, arrogance, and grit. But those kinds of
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qualities can really curdle when you make the journey from underdog to
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incumbent—especially if you end up rich and untouchable, and surrounded by
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yes-men with blue ticks. To the rest of us, it looks like a real beast of a
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mid-life crisis, and it's playing out on an open stage. Everyone wants to look
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away, but he insists on putting his cringe right in front of us and
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gesticulating over it. It's terrible.
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I think most rubyists would be pragmatic enough to just accept things for what
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they are and let them settle, if he'd just let them. If he stopped posting
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inflammatory rightwing nonsense then we could all pretend he wasn't drunkenly
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stumbling towards the open arms of QAnon and the manosphere with tears of joy
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on his face. The deal is this: if he can shut his mouth, we can hold our noses.
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Then we can all make this work despite our differences. The alternative is that
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Rails keeps shrinking and sliding into irrelevance as Shopify's Backend, some
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parts of which are open source.
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I'm Johan Halse: web developer, feared duelist, renowned lover, compulsive
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liar. I made this fat footer because that's how footers are supposed to look
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these days!
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While you're here, consider following me on Mastodon. Am I always correct on
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Mastodon? No. But am I always hilarious? Also no. But I'm angling for enough
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followers to credibly call myself a "thought leader" and retire to a quiet life
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of picking shameful public fights with JavaScript celebrities.
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If Mastodon's not your jam, maybe star one of my GitHub repos. It's really the
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least you can do.
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Also: if you found my technical writing interesting, you should know that I
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founded a company called Varvet many years ago and they're still going, so give
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them a buzz if you want help with web stuff.
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Copyright © Johan Halse 2025
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References:
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[1] https://johan.hal.se/
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[2] https://github.com/johanhalse
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[3] https://ruby.social/@hejsna
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[4] https://github.com/johanhalse
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[5] https://ruby.social/@hejsna
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[6] https://github.com/johanhalse
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[7] https://ruby.social/@hejsna
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[8] https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2023/01/13/twitter-didnt-need-fixing/
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[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ&t=11655s
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[10] https://byroot.github.io/ruby/performance/2025/08/11/unlocking-ractors-generic-variables.html
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[11] https://tenderlovemaking.com/2024/09/29/eliminating-intermediate-array-allocations/
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[12] https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/
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[13] https://world.hey.com/dhh/meta-goes-no-politics-at-work-and-nobody-cares-d6409209
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[14] https://world.hey.com/dhh/make-politics-private-again-9b47aaaf
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[15] https://world.hey.com/dhh/linkedin-71ee75d9
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[16] https://johan.hal.se/wrote/2024/11/19/turbo-considered-harmful/
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[17] https://www.phlex.fun/
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