RR 428: Arming the Rebels with Rails 6 Featuring David Heinemeier Hansson

Jan 12, 2021

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Today’s guest is David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and co founder and CTO at Basecamp. This episode is focused on the release of Rails 6. David talks about the process of getting from Rails 5 to Rails 6 and some of the new features and frameworks in Rails 6. David describes some of the new features as ‘magical, which some people don’t like. He believes that the ‘magical’ element is a good thing because it reduces the learning curve for newcomers, so you can less time studying and more time being productive. This is important because it allows people from other platforms to jump on. Rails 6 will provide users with more frameworks so that they do not have to build all of their own solutions to common problems. David delves into how Ruby goes against the grain by providing tools and how that coincides with their philosophy. He talks about the process for deciding which problems the core team is going to tackle, how they come out of Basecamp, and Basecamp’s methodology in terms of what tools they decide to build. The panel discusses how deviating from the Rails core is almost an antipattern and how having the tools provided for them has improved their experience with Rails. David talks about some more upcoming frontend products and more on the process of updating Basecamp. He talks about his belief that most companies should not be inspired by how the big tech companies structure their internal teams. The conversation turns to how Shopify and Github are now running Rails 6 and how they have influenced the feature that have been added to Ruby. David believes that it’s important to focus on how to make a framework that solves problems for people but also focuses on real world results and businesses. Ruby wants to continue to “arm the rebels” by enabling small independent software makers to continue to challenge the industry giants. The show finishes with David giving some advice to new Rails programmers. Panel

David Kimura
Andrew Mason
Nate Hopkins
Charles Max Wood

Guest

David Heinemeier Hansson