What the Basecamp exodus means for the future of Ruby on Rails and Hotwire 🏃🏽‍♀️

if you're a regular follower of my channel you would probably know that i'm a ruby on rails developer and most of my videos here are about how to build applications in ruby on rails one of the technologies i've taken an interest in lately is the new hot wire framework which is a front-end javascript library that integrates nicely with rails i think the new concepts introduced by hotwire have great potential for keeping ruby on rails relevant by offering a simpler alternative to complex frameworks like react and vue.js but that bright future for ruby on rails and hotwire may now be in jeopardy thanks to an internal upheaval at a company called basecamp basecamp is a chicago-based company where ruby on rails was created ruby on rails itself was designed to be the core framework for this company's flagship product an online collaboration tool called basecamp basecamp cto dhh is one of the most influential people in the field of web development he's known for having very opinionated stances on how to write good architecture and many of his ideas are injected into the core of the ruby on rails framework he's a brilliant engineer who changed the way companies across the industry approach software design many common architectures that you now see in other web programming frameworks are modeled after the design patterns popularized by ruby on rails and because dhh has veto power over the ruby on rails open source project pretty much anything that goes into rails including its experimental technologies like hotwire turbo stimulus js and webpacker are all integrated into the core function of serving the needs of the basecamp product on monday april 26 the ceo of base camp jason fried published a controversial blog post announcing sweeping changes to the company culture and benefits policies at the top of the list is a new policy banning employees from talking about politics at work some of the initial online reactions i've read about this policy were fairly neutral about it comparing it to a similar policy introduced by coinbase a few months ago my first impression was that this was just an attempt by a company to remain apolitical in a very polarized mainstream environment but upon closer look the reason for this announcement runs quite a bit deeper as of today the following saturday close to one third of base camp's entire workforce has resigned in response to this policy it's very unusual to see employees leave a tech company in mass without any immediate plans especially for a company like base camp which has a reputation for having such a good work environment an article by the verge spills more details about what's likely going on apparently this conflict started over a joke created by the customer service department at base camp over 10 years ago a list of names circulated by customer service reps that made fun of customers real names some of the names on this list were considered offensive by other employees because the jokes made allusions to race gender and foreign cultures this list along with separate employee-led initiatives at the company to increase diversity and inclusion as business practices apparently became a contentious point of discussion at the company as a debate over these issues he became heated the company founder's response was last week's announcement of new internal policies employees took offense of this action because they felt that their discussion was not about politics but about improving the company's workforce by banning discussion the employees felt that management was dismissive of their concerns that are important to them and therefore they're leaving the roles in protest now for this video i'm not here to favor one side or the other i'm simply explaining what happened and what this might mean for the future of the ruby on rails community the loss of this talent at base camp is a detriment to the entire ruby on rails community and its associated open source projects some of the top engineers working on the new hotwire framework are among the employees leaving base camp some of these engineers have publicly announced that they will no longer be contributing to the project at least one contributor closed down all of his open pull requests the long term impact of these engineers withdrawals is yet to be seen leadership of the rails open source project may be affected by this as well if the controversy of this list of names changes the perception of base camp's product among its customers it could seriously hamper base camp's business this would mean that base camp has fewer resources to put into developing rails which will hurt the entire community as i've said earlier rails is nothing more than the core engine running base camp and its new email service hey which the company has made available as open source technology if basecamp goes away what might happen to rails if base camp's influence over the rails project roads plenty of other companies heavily invested in rails through their existing systems will have a financial incentive to maintain the legacy code base some very big names in tech like shopify etsy github twitch and twitter use ruby on rails and no doubt they have talented engineers who can take on that challenge dhh owns a trademark to the rail's name and branding but if for whatever reason he loses the team that he needs to enact his ideas and rails starts to atrophy then anyone in the community can fork the rails project and start setting a new direction maybe it'll be under a different name but the code itself has enough people who care about it that at least i think that it's likely to live on in some form dhh has many great ideas that i think have kept ruby and rails a cutting edge platform for developer productivity hot wire i think is another great example of how rails is staying innovative and staying relevant but dhh isn't the only source of fresh ideas for improving rails engineers at companies that use rails at an enterprise scale often come up with their own ideas for doing things a better way i've seen many cases where an engineer feels that the default set of opinions of how you should do things in rails doesn't work for the type of problem being solved so the engineer will tweak or work around rails in a way that's more suitable and there are times when opinions like that might get discussed in the community but don't get officially incorporated into the rails project because dhh has a differing opinion just a few weeks ago shopify released a style guide of their own called upgrow which shows how their team tackles problems of scale dhh disagreed with some of the concepts and after brief but critical exchange on twitter shopify took down the guide however i think this example demonstrates the brilliance of the rails community and how there could be a flood of new ideas into the platform if for whatever reason dhh steps back from his leadership role in the event that base camp's influence diminishes maybe in a few years the community will have a new widely used fork of the code that's maintained by a consortium of developers from different companies something like the python django foundation might be created for the rails community don't forget that rails is not the same as ruby while it's an important part of the ruby community it's just a sub segment the ruby language is very strong its performance is better than ever with version 3 and some really smart people really enjoy working with it and contributing so if the right people pick up the torch this community can continue to thrive in the next decade this crisis of talent is just a test of ruby on rails staying power as an influence on the internet it certainly is a setback for the development of hotwire because of the loss of the engineers but this is also a rapidly unfolding event and we have yet to see how it will play out maybe it will end up being a non-event just a bump in the road maybe six months from now base camp will have a new team working on it bringing fresh ideas to rails and hot wire making it even better a crisis like this can also bring opportunity if you want me to keep you updated on the future of rails then be sure to hit the like button on this video to give it visibility and subscribe to my channel and also hit that bell icon so that you never miss an update and as always i'll see you next time

Channel: Winston Kotzan

Views: 4,914

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Id: ixBh6IT2Xk4

Length: 9min 17sec (557 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021