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But I started talking about it on the Ruby Talk mailing list, and I got in touch with a number of people who were like, "Oh yeah, I'm also working on this. Hey, could you send me the early version?" So even before 0.5 was released, a number of people already had the Rails source code. And some of those people were -- I... |
Thomas Fuchs, famous for script.aculo.us, and he works on Freckle now, and so on... |
Let's see, what else do we have on the list here...? Rick Olson - I think he's still at GitHub - did a lot of cool work in the beginning. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Technoweenie? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Technoweenie, exactly. We still have those IRC handles on the core alumni list, which is kind of funny. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, some may know him less as Rick Olson and more as Technoweenie, so... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Right, exactly. And the same thing with Thomas Fuchs, he was Mad Robbie. Sam Stevenson, who I work with alongside Jeremy Kemper at Basecamp to this day was one of the very first core contributors as well. He worked on the prototype back in the day, and of course continues to do all sorts o... |
Perhaps some of those people are pretty well known. There's a couple other guys that were around in the early days that perhaps the open source community (at least the Ruby open source community) haven't heard from as much. Scott Barron was one of the guys; Florian Weber, who did a lot of the early work on Twitter was ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Nice. One thing I wanna just double back, a question I was thinking of asking when we were talking about the initial release and just kind of got lost in the stuff there was you obviously prepared and you had an advocacy or a marketer's look at getting it out there... Still though, were you surprised b... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Of course. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Of course... \[laughter\] |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** That would be the height of arrogance, I think, beyond even my capabilities, if I just said "What? What are you talking about? In 2003 I knew that tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of programmers would use Rails over the years." \[laughter\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I had him at whoops. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** \[47:48\] Yeah, there's no way that I think anyone could have foreseen that. What I did foresee though was that it was gonna be popular. The reason I knew this was it just felt so much better. I knew pretty quickly into it that "Holy crap, this is not just like 10% better, 15% better than ... |
I thought if you're sitting on that kind of leap, there's no way that's not gonna have some uptake, there's no way that people are just gonna say "Meh, I don't care. So what if I can have like three times the amount of fun and be three times as productive...? No big deal to me" - absolutely not. But, it's still a huge,... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Just on the note of not being surprised by the success, when we go back the line of the history of Rails, we also sort of indirectly parallel Basecamp too, because they were sort of side by side to a degree in terms of existing. How did the success of Rails lead into the success of Basecamp, and not... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** So one of the things when we started with Basecamp was we didn't have a lot of money, right? We did not take any VC funding; we were funding the development of Basecamp entirely off the consulting projects that we had at the time at 37 signals. And as anyone knows, if you have a four-perso... |
The only thing that we had that we could do was we could share what we learned and we could use that as our marketing. We could build an audience. People were sort of interested in what we had to say, because we were sharing our techniques and thoughts about business, about technology, about programming, and then we we... |
Basecamp was the original application, so anyone looking at Rails usually also looked at Basecamp, because that was sort of the validation. "I don't know about this Rails thing, but I guess if it can make Basecamp, it's worth a second look." I think that's one of those things that is just so important about extractions... |
Lots of people, they just look at "What was made with this? What can you make with this?", which in some ways is a funny test to put up, because everything is Turing complete; you can make anything with anything. We could still be making websites with Visual Basic; actually, for all I know, some people still are. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm sure there's a few. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Okay, so you can make anything with anything, right? So it's kind of a funny test, but I think it's also just a very primal one. We wanna see "What was it up to?" and I think at the very least it just lends credibility to the builders. If the first app that was made with Rails was some cra... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[52:15\] We had a similar conversation recently with Rob Eisenberg. He created Durandal, and then recently two JavaScript client frameworks... And Durandal, the product he created with it, it had since failed not so much because of the framework, but because of the business model or the company or ... |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** And there was this symbiotic relationship. Rails derived a lot of legitimacy from being extracted from Basecamp, and Basecamp got a lot of leads because people got interested in Rails. And sometimes people over-subscribe how much truly came out of that; these days, if you ask the vast majo... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I think if nothing else, it probably helped on the talent side, helped you get talent early. I mean, you've got Kemper and Stevenson still there today, where it probably helped attract developers. Do you think that was the case early on, people that wanted to be working with Ruby? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Absolutely, yeah. Yes, we got to cherry-pick some amazing programmers, not just because of Rails, but in the early days just because of Ruby. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** Most people would choose not being paid to do Ruby back in the day. I recall that first RubyConf I went to back in 2004, and I recall asking "Oh, so how many people are being paid to work on Ruby?" and literally I think two hands went up, out of the 40 people there; not exactly a huge samp... |
And of course, even to this day, it's still a great way of attracting people. Basecamp is a place that is still active in open source, still shares and helps steer Rails, and you're gonna get to work on all that. Of course that helps. |
**Jerod Santo:** Absolutely. Let's move forward a little bit... 2.0 we said was in 2007; let's look at 3.0, which launched August 29th, 2010. If I recall, that was the big Merb and Rails merge release, is that correct? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** That's correct. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. Share a little bit on that; we don't have to go too far into the Merb and Rails history, but kind of how that came about and how Merb affected Rails during that time. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** \[56:02\] Sure. So at that time one of the big Rails shops was Engine Yard. They were doing hosting for Rails applications, and Ezra started Merb initially I believe - I'm a little fuzzy on the history, but as a sort of "Oh well, if you have some performance issues with these parts of Rail... |
If you're making let's say the router more efficient, why wouldn't we just make the Rails router more efficient? So I started talking to people at Engine Yard and -- I mean, it was still a little bit contentious at times, I'm not gonna lie... There was a little bit of -- obviously, Ezra and the team around it, they sor... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** There you go. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** That the Merb group was focused on a number of real performance and other issues that we just hadn't addressed. It wasn't because we didn't want to address them, it was just because nobody had done the work... And here came a group that did the work. So we found a way to make that happen t... |
We spent the time and ported over a bunch of these Merb advances in efficiency and so forth, and Rails turned out to be stronger for it. And we got some new members on the core team, and we enlarged the community, and we didn't splinter the community. I think some of the pains, for example, that Node is currently going... |
**Jerod Santo:** Avoid it. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** At least fold back in. We didn't avoid it 100%, because there were six months perhaps where there was some contentious debate back and forth, and splitting of the community, and in the end we ended up folding it and Rails turned out to be better for it, and everyone turned out to win, beca... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, not doubt the community bolstered and not divided is a huge win. What were some of the technical wins, in your mind, of the merge? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** \[01:00:05.29\] Efficiency. I'd say efficiency and extendability, to some extent. There was a perception that the dish of Rails, the 21 course meal, was completely fixed and that the chef would accept no substitutions, and that was not my opinion at all. It was my fault, obviously, for all... |
I think it was after Rails 3 where RSpec, for example, didn't require a lot of monkey patching to do its work, because we had the hooks and extension points to make it possible, and we got a bunch of efficiency gains; I think the router was one of the things where a bunch of work went into that, and I think also in oth... |
So I was not hitting a lot of these issues, and still Rails became better. And maybe I was going to hit those issues three months later, and then I was thankful that they had done the work. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Just to clarify there, it sounds like Merb was created by Ezra and Yehuda when they were working at Engine Yard because they thought that you as the chef wouldn't welcome the additions to the menu - is that right? |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** That's part of the reason, yes. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. |
**David Heinemeier Hansson:** And that is a failure of open source governance. One of the things I took away from that was it's very easy to cultivate this perception of elitism, that there is this hallowed core of Rails developers - they make all the decisions, they take no input from anyone and anyone who posts contr... |
We need a larger team of more diverse interests where some people find great pleasure and value in doing the review of contributions work, and we have that today. That's basically what I was celebrating when we were talking about the 12,000 pull requests process. There was no way that was gonna happen back in the Rails... |
\[01:04:10.19\] I think that the path today for new contributors is it's a lot nicer and friendlier than it was back then, and that's prevented us from running into the same issue with the next splinter group we thought that their input wouldn't be valued. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And now, a word from our sponsor. |
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