David Heinemeier Hansson

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, cofounder of Basecamp. http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/

From the article: "In the year since the elephants left, Feld says circus attendance dropped precipitously." This is a great lesson to businesses in general - know if your critics are actually your core customers. The overlap between people who protested elephants and the people who attended the circus was pretty small. The company ended up listening to a very vocal minority and then lost a lot of business from the quiet group of customers for whom the elephants were the major draw and who then stopped buying tickets. This also applies to open source projects and brings to mind DHH's article http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.html

Seems to be classic DHH. Reminds me of Rails is Omakase: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.html

Go is omakase. "But there's a fine line between a friendly suggestion and a belligerent diner. That line is usually exposed when the suggestion is declined: "I'm sorry, but hotdogs don't really fit our sushi menu, and while you may not care for unagi, we picked it for a reason. But thanks for the suggestions!". If only most arguments about the menu would stop there. But they don't, do they? They usually carry on and on. BUT I REALLY DON'T LIKE UNAGI!!! IT'S OFFENDING MY TASTE BUDS THAT IT'S PART OF THE DEFAULT COURSE SETTING. TAKE IT OOOOOOFFFFF!! Okay, buddy, sit down and have a sake." http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.html Don't get me wrong, I love the language, however, I think about this everytime I read about language proposals being nuked (cough generics).

> He'll write about what he knows. I'll get a glimpse into this life and what it's like to live it. Maybe he has more time for oil painting and reading fiction than any Musk or Zuckerberg I've ever read anything by. Maybe I'll decide to do things the same way he did. He made and maintains Ruby on Rails and in 2014 won his class in the 82nd running of the 24 hours of Le Mans. Other things he has more time for are listed at the top of http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/

Up until now it has mostly been opinions and biases and even though many popular programmers[1] have been saying this for a very long time, it's great to see a controlled study done about it. This makes it a fact and a great counter argument for helping a lot of programmers who are being forced to practice TDD because of the generally accepted claims in productivity and code quality associated with doing it. [1] http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.…

That seems like more of an argument against mocking in general. Even if you DI you are still expecting X method to be called on the mock object and have created that coupling. I think DHH describes a great example that illustrates a big difference in philosophy around this: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/dependency-injection-is-not-a-…

He has a son named Colt, apparently: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/#family

Worth recalling what DHH had to say about Wasabi in 2006: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/arc/2006_09.html Scroll down to the part "Fear, Uncertain, and Doubt by Joel Spolsky" from September 01 (permalink 404s)

Some Background: The RailsConf keynote that started it all: http://www.confreaks.com/videos/3315-railsconf-keynote-writing-softwar… David's thoughts in blog post form: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.… A response from Kent Beck https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/rip-tdd/750840194948847 This should be a great discussion.

Interesting link: David Hansson, creator of Rails, is also a professional race car driver. http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/#driver

Probably the drama surrounding a recent Rails commit [0] and DHHs follow-up blog post. [1] [0] https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/61b91c4c55bcbd5a2ec85d6e1c677551… [1] http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.html

I remember reading DHH's blog post about him sucking at math and focusing on solving easy problems: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/arc/000462.html It's a good read for those that think that you need to be a super mathematician and know every algorithm to be an awesome programmer. Programming is much more than algorithms and maths. I think it's terrible that some companies judge programmers by how many algorithms they know, it seems like a bad filter, because you will filter out people like DHH (and a ton of other great programmers).

His homepage reminds me of this quite a bit: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/

I can't recall ever hearing anyone say they "hate Ruby". Ruby is designed to make programmers happy. Ruby and Rails are "boring" because they are mature and do their job extremely well, so the cutting-edge devs that helped get them there got bored and moved on to other newer ecosystems. If you are more interested in getting the project done fast and efficiently and you don't mind doing it someone else's way, then RoR is a good choice. If you like to do things your own way, then Rails will probably frustrate you because it is very opinionated on how things are done. You can override everything, but some people's personality is more suited for the node.js world that is far less of a framework and more of an ecosystem of libraries. These are 2 popular posts that will help you figure out if RoR is a personality fit for you: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.html https://medium.com/@timbuchwaldt/rails-is-boring-thats-great-f896e9ab2…

The big mistake was trying to provide anything beyond Minimongo on the client side. People are very picky about what front-end frameworks they use on the front end, and typically people who have strong opinions about that are less opinionated about what they use on the back end. I'm firmly in that camp, for instance. I've been a huge fan of Firebase for a while because it frees me from the tedium of having to create another REST application just to talk to a database. If Meteor had, from the beginning, focused on simply being a kick-ass open-source alternative to Firebase they would be killing it right now. It was a monumental task to try to create something that would please both front-end and back-end web engineers. Another issue with Meteor is that it was envisioned, not extracted. [1] From Rail's creator, DHH: "First, Rails is not my job. I don't want it to be my job. The best frameworks are in my opinion extracted, not envisioned. And the best way to extract is first to actually do." Meteor was the goal, not an actual, real-world application. Often when this is the case the software ends up solving a bunch of problems that seem logical to solve, but in practice are not actually practical (another framework like this that comes to mind is the notorious famo.us project). Compare this to Rails and React which were forged in the crucible of real, day-to-day development and problem solving. [1] - http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/posts/6-why-theres-no-rails-inc

> Because DHH is just one person. And he only has DHH's experiences. Yep. Uncle Bob is one person, too. tl;dr Think for yourself and don't listen to somebody just because they hurt your feelings. > To pick a topical example: Is TDD hard in Rails apps because TDD is dead or because Rails makes TDD hard? This is a misrepresentation of what DHH has said [1], which is that strict adherence to TDD can make your designs worse: > Over the years, the test-first rhetoric got louder and angrier, though. More mean-spirited. And at times I got sucked into that fundamentalist vortex, feeling bad about not following the true gospel. Then I'd try test-first for a few weeks, only to drop it again when it started hurting my designs. > Used as a hammer to beat down the nonbelievers, declare them unprofessional and unfit for writing software. A litmus test. If you watch the conversations between DHH, Martin Fowler, and Kent Beck, it seems to me that they all agree: testing is good, test-driven design can be bad, and mocking everything is bad [2][3]. I took some time last week to re-read Uncle Bob's book, Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices [4], and Kent Beck's book on TDD [5]. There was a huge difference: Uncle Bob focuses on test-driven design, while Kent Beck focuses on test-driven development. Uncle Bob claims that test-driven development (especially through mocks) universally improves your design, because it reduces coupling and enables refactoring. Kent…

people ... don’t want to change how they write code. They just want tests for it Have you considered the possibility that those people are right? That's a reasonable conclusion to make if you are seeing lots of otherwise smart people that share an opinion that disagrees with yours. There are lots of valid reasons to change the style in which you write code. In my mind, fitting somebody's fad testing scheme is not one of them. Here's a second opinion from a guy who also likes tests, but doesn't think it's a good idea to structure your whole codebase just to accommodate them: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/test-induced-design-damage.htm…

Reminds me of this: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.…

DHH posted about his bad airline experience[1] in 2013. An app for addressing both your experience and his experience is feasible for the HN crowd. Please steal this business plan[2]. tl;dr Today, getting issues resolved places the burden of effort is the wronged. This can be shifted. "Reversing" things does wonders. [1] http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2013/american-airlines-earned-an-en… [2] https://gist.github.com/iL3D/59df64947d42828d848ebfc1651a3122

Very relevant 3 year old DHH article: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.…

Omakase is in reference to http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.html

That's weird, but I believe I remember seeing some DHH writings talking about coding in anger around the time he was defending cursing and sexually suggestive mostly-nude slides at Ruby confs[1]. I blew the phrase off as as a DHH-ism, thinking maybe he believed in trying to remain angry while coding or something crazy like that. Thanks for explaining the term! 1) http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/posts/39-im-an-r-rated-individual

Was a reference to this post: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.html where Rails is described as a curated set of defaults/components/tools/options.

The Rails guy wrote about this. http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.…

You're missing the central point of default rails stack. http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/rails-is-omakase.html

As I'm sure you know, that's wrong. http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/posts/31-myth-2-rails-is-expected-t…

DDH was against TDD, but not against testing. http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.…

Angular2 wants dependency injection and for that to work well it needs named interfaces and thus ends up with TypeScript as its first citizen language. This is fair choice but it shows the background of the designers of Angular and that they in some sense really don't grok JavaScript. Here is a blog from mr. Ruby-on-Rails explaining why DI is a stranger in the Ruby world: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2012/dependency-injection-is-not-a-… With some parallels I think.