David, Please Stop Posting

Let's be realistic: DHH isn't going anywhere. He owns the trademarks, he controls the Rails Foundation, he sits on the board of Shopify, and he doesn't give a shit about you. In fact, he seems positively giddy at the idea of people being driven away by his occasionally repugnant blog posts and xeets. I'm sure he'd very much like an ideologically pure userbase for Rails, the same way he'd love for Britain to only contain native brits, wink wink. If that means the "Rails community" becomes a small stagnant pool of people getting paid to cheer for him and Tobi, that's clearly a price he's willing to pay! He'll be staying on, whether you like it or not.

But be that as it may, I sincerely wish he would just shut up. He has a severe case of American Brainworm and like most of that parasite's hosts, he's absolutely determined to infect everyone else with their culture war. He actually managed to recognize how harmful it was to his own company, and banned political discussions as a consequence. But somehow, he has yet to grasp the fact that in a bankshot way, everyone working with Rails is working with him at their day job, and it's exactly as corrosive to the Ruby community as it was inside Basecamp at the time. It's sort of unreal to me that he can't wrap his head around that, having gone through what he did and having taken so much obvious psychic damage from it. To the best of my kremlinology it seems like he views these posts as some fun harmless sport, where he goes off to "annoy people on the Internet" as a way of blowing off steam, to then sit back and guffaw to himself at how he really pwned the woke-ass SJWs this time, won't they get their panties in a twist, haha roflmao pepe the frog meme dot jpeg. Then he can't refrain from diving into the backlash and escalating the conflict even further. I wish he'd stop. It's unseemly. It's destructive.

Run me on a need-to-know basis

I have no idea what political views John Hawthorn, Xavier Noria, Jean Boussier, or the rest of the core team hold. You read something from Byroot or Tenderlove and it'll be all competence and excellence and sometimes very bad dad jokes and I can respect these people for what they do and how they conduct themselves both online and in real life. I really don't need to know if they're paying members of the Charlie Kirk fanclub, or if they think people with ADHD should just stop fidgeting and get over themselves. I don't need them to air their grievances with DHH in public, either–I don't know whether they've patted him on the back and said "good one" every time he's spat another slimy gob of far-right politics at everyone, or whether they've privately told him to please stop because they're collateral damage in his tiresome rants. And not knowing is a splendid and magnificent thing, because it means we can all project our beliefs onto the core team and they can remain paragons of Ruby virtue to everyone. Recent events have also shown pretty conclusively that anyone who fails to show Dear Leader enough respect will be promptly replaced by some AI-assisted Shopify drone. The current economy is heavily tilted towards the people holding the bags of money and they're squeezing that for all it's worth—I have a lot of sympathy towards people who just want to do their job and avoid getting fired because they're not enthusiastic enough towards the mad king.

But I really do think that being a leader and a public figure, in open source as well as in a company, comes with a price of admission: it requires some goddamn decency. Elementary shit like being able to contain your glee when you feel the political winds blowing your way. Not antagonizing others for the lulz. Not broadcasting virulent American schisms to the rest of us sorry fucks who are already inundated with FAR TOO MUCH OF IT on top of all the mass layoffs, AI shenanigans, and russian drone strikes we wake up to every day. If you can't extend this kind of basic courtesy to the people who work with you, you're just not a good leader. He gets called a fascist and bristles at it, but the fact is that he picked each and every one of these fights himself. And again, it's mind-bendingly strange how someone like DHH, given his long history of telling others to keep it private and not get political, doesn't get this. The rest of Rails core seem to understand it perfectly well.

The deal

Rails has been a successful project for literally decades now, and with a few tweaks it's still a great choice for anyone who wants to build solid web applications. Ruby as a language and ecosystem has benefitted tremendously from it, too. People can get paid to write in what often looks like magical pseudocode, that's a lovely thing, and I believe David's personality was a big part of its early success. Going up against what he calls the Merchants of Complexity with their onerous but well-funded Java and Microsoft stacks required a strong mix of courage, arrogance, and grit. But those kinds of qualities can really curdle when you make the journey from underdog to incumbent—especially if you end up rich and untouchable, and surrounded by yes-men with blue ticks. To the rest of us, it looks like a real beast of a mid-life crisis, and it's playing out on an open stage. Everyone wants to look away, but he insists on putting his cringe right in front of us and gesticulating over it. It's terrible.

I think most rubyists would be pragmatic enough to just accept things for what they are and let them settle, if he'd just let them. If he stopped posting inflammatory rightwing nonsense then we could all pretend he wasn't drunkenly stumbling towards the open arms of QAnon and the manosphere with tears of joy on his face. The deal is this: if he can shut his mouth, we can hold our noses. Then we can all make this work despite our differences. The alternative is that Rails keeps shrinking and sliding into irrelevance as Shopify's Backend, some parts of which are open source.