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**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, speak for yourself... Maybe our notes don't reflect a start date prior to today, but our thoughts have definitely been there. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Excellent. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You know, I can say that I take back my history to the beginnings of Ruby and the beginnings of Rails. I can remember first working on it in 2006. I think it was 2005-2006, so that's like forever ago to me. Let me look up the birthday of Rails... That was July 24th 2005? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** '04. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** 2004. So July 24th, 2004... Oh, I had it wrong then, when I was looking up my notes. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Which is really -- I mean, it's the release of Rails, or the first public release of Rails. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, which was 0.5...? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** 0.5. There was a 0.4, 0.3, 0.2, 0.1 and before I was counting that went before that, which started in the summer of 2003 really. That was when the first bits of Rails started coming together. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Now I know you tend to walk into a situation like this, like a podcast, to have this conversation, you're typically known, but just in case there's a listener out there saying, "Who the heck is this guy?", who are you? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Sure. I am David Heinemeier Hansson, I am the creator of Ruby on Rails, and I continue to be involved with the development of Ruby on Rails. I'm also a partner and the CTO of Basecamp, which is a project management tool, the original Rails app, the app that Rails was extracted from. I'm a ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Author, racer... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** \[04:13\] Yeah, I wrote a couple books. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm super interested to see that you actually drive a race car. That's so cool. I tried to drive a race car on the streets, it's called a Mustang, but whatever... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Yeah, on the track is a different animal altogether. Really, it's a fantastic \[unintelligible 00:04:30.11\] A great second way of getting to that magic called state of flow, which is what I really love about programming; when it really works, when it really clicks, you get into the state ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, absolutely. And how difficult it is to get there, sometimes... It's always a challenge. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Absolutely. |
**Jerod Santo:** So you say you extracted Rails out of Basecamp back in the day... To this day, that seems to be one of its virtues - that it's had a large, very popular production app to track through time. Where did that initial insight come from? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** So when I started working on Basecamp, it was basically there that I decided that Ruby was gonna be something I was interested in pursuing, because prior to Basecamp, I had been working on client projects, and clients back in 2003 and earlier, they wanted PHP, at least for the contracting ... |
But I then discovered Ruby through a number of articles by various -- it's kind of funny to say this word, because it's been mocked so much that people think you say it ironically now, whenever you mention it, but thought leaders. I still think of it as that, even if that word is contained... |
**Jerod Santo:** Like who? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Martin Fowler, Dave Thomas... I remember those two names from IEEE magazine and a couple of other software development magazines at the time, just mentioning and explaining their thought patterns using Ruby. I thought, "Hey, here are all these very smart people who I look up to and have le... |
To try Ruby for Basecamp, I obviously needed just to build some stuff, because there just weren't a whole lot of people using Ruby back at that time, and the people that were using Ruby, not a lot of them were using it for web stuff, and I came in from having had most of my programming exposure to PHP and Java, with a ... |
**Jerod Santo:** You seem to hit upon a lot of ideas that were avant-garde at the time; nowadays, people who are new to web development, these are kind of -- they're not clichés, but they're tried and true things that other frameworks have borrowed over time. I think a few shows back we had Taylor Otwell on, of Laravel... |
\[08:15\] Some of those things, like a conventional reconfiguration, the opinionated aspect of Rails and a few other things - where did those ideas come from? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** I had been exposed to PHP and I had been exposed to Java, as I said, and that obviously taught me a lot... And a lot of what it had taught me was things I did not want. I did not wanna waste my time doing -- we called it in the early days "XML sit-ups." That was a stable of configuring any... |
I just looked at that and thought, "No, it is not magically good." I need a framework that I can use myself, as one programmer, working spare time on Basecamp, and be productive enough that we're making substantial progress, and I have to feel like that's a good use of my time. I could do all sorts of other things. If ... |
That's a bit of an overstatement... Of course I wasn't feeling like crap all the time when I was programming in PHP or Java, but I was feeling like crap enough of the time that it just lit a fire. I shouldn't say "it lit a fire", it was sort of volatile elements that once I added Ruby to the mix just combusted. Because... |
The question wasn't "How do we make the programmer feel good?", the question was "How do we do all these other things that are sort of sympathetic to the machine, sympathetic to the compile process" or whatever else have you. They were not about "How do you make the programmer feel?" and they were certainly not about h... |
\[11:45\] That was just an a-ha moment, that Ruby sort of gave me permission to think those lines of thought. I already had this discontent, but I didn't know where to take the discontent and feeling like "This is not great... Ugh, it's frustrating! Why can't I get stuff done?" Then all of a sudden Ruby comes in and sa... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So that's where Rails came from with Basecamp then, basically... It was your love and passion for a rethinking of how you can program, and the idea that you had this open abyss, because Jason didn't care, and it was in your core to choose, so if you were choosing, you were choosing developer happine... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** I think maybe halfway through. We started in the summer of '03, and we released something in -- was it February of '04? I think it was 1st February, 2004. So there was a process of about six months maybe... Six months of part-time, I should say. Because I was going to school at the time, a... |
Anyway, so there was this process of about six calendar months where I was working on it, and perhaps halfway through I realized that I had just made a bunch of tools, so I needed something to talk to the database, I needed something to create the templates, I needed some controllers... I needed a bunch of things, and ... |
I remember feeling this sense of actually obligation, which is otherwise a word I pushback against pretty hard in a lot of contexts, but... Even at that time, I had already spent years working with open source software. Open source just struck me as just such an obviously better idea, just such an obviously better para... |
I remember thinking, "Yeah, they're probably not gonna have that if they just come to Ruby as it looks today, without any of this additional stuff", because it was just too much they had to cook from scratch... And while I was enjoying that path, I could totally see somebody like "Hey, I'm on a deadline here. I've gott... |
**Jerod Santo:** You felt this sort of obligation to the open source community, and you have your Basecamp product coming out and you decided to go ahead and make a framework of it... You also did something which again was, I think, unique back in 2004, and nowadays is just kind of compulsory for everybody who wants to... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** \[16:08\] Yup, building a blog. |
**Jerod Santo:** That really seemed to work well... What made you decide to do that? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** So given the fact that I had already been an open source user for quite some time, I also observed open source and programmer behavior for quite some time... And one of the things that always struck me as so very odd was this notion that programmers hated marketing, that marketing was dirt... |
If people do not know what you've created, it doesn't matter how great it is; they're not gonna get any value out of it. Why wouldn't you "sell your ideas"? If you think your ideas are worthy of releasing, you should also think your ideas are worthy of promotion. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** So I just decided Rails was not gonna fall in that category, and perhaps to some extent Ruby, too... That I was just gonna put it out there and then whoever wants to use it can use it, but that's kind of on their own volition - hell no; this was gonna be an advocacy job, and I wanted it to... |
A lot of people just accustomed themselves to acclimate to the environment that they're in, even if that environment is terrible. I thought, "Nope, I'm not gonna basically allow you to sit there and not know that there's a better way for it", which I recognize that that sounds arrogant; that's the word. |
I remember from the early days of Rails advocacy that that was the insult that was most often swung at me, right? "You're arrogant. You think you have a better way? What gives you the right to say so?", and I thought "That is such a curious and peculiar argument. Of course I think I have a better way. Why the hell else... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's an idealist idea, that the cream always rises to the top. I know my dad used to always say that to me, and he's a bit of a romantic as well. I wish I could believe that, but I'm with you that you have to actually put stuff out there and you do have to advocate, especially because there's so ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[20:11\] I have a slightly different angle on this though, because while I remember your charismatic ways and your ability to get an audience enthusiastic about what you're showing off, I also remember the whoops, and I almost wonder if that was part of your marketing plea, because you were just so... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** That's pretty funny, because at the same time that's one of the things that rubbed other people the wrong way, especially back in... I think the video recording is from 2004-2005. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I was gonna ask you, where were you at, what were you doing to do this video? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** It's funny, because one of the things I absolutely hate is repeating myself, which should come as no surprise to anyone working in Ruby; we all try to avoid, right? Well, I try to avoid it too in any type of public speaking, that's why I don't do a lot conference talks. Even before confere... |
What I then did was I basically -- I think I just played that audio in the background, and then I recorded a video to fit that, such that I didn't actually have to narrate the video one more time, because [laughing] I don't know, I just, like that would be a, that would be a hassle. So the whoops -- the whole thing was... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you like the fact though that Rails is - I guess to the early adopters, the early visibility people that were sort of watching this space back then, it may not be apparent if someone came into the Rails world in the last 4-5 years maybe to stumble upon that... But to those that have kind of b... |
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