In defense of DHH & the Rails comminity

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Wednesday, April 29. 2009

In defense of DHH & the Rails comminity

No, my machine was not hacked. Yes, I do believe that DHH and the Rails community has done far more to advance web development than the Apache Software Foundation. I radically disagree with J Aaron Farr's post comparing the two.

First, I am a fan of DHH. I think he's a wicked smart person and that Rails as a piece of software and as a catalyst for web development is a milestone. DHH built Rails and created the Rails community. He's done a masterful job. He's also become more of a statesman over the years. With that being said, I'm not a huge fan of the Rails community or its culture.

I'm a user of a lot of Apache Software Foundation stuff. It's solid. It's maintained. With the possible exception of Wicket, none of it is groundbreaking. In fact, some of it is poorly designed crap. I'm an Apache commiter (perhaps not for long) on the ESME project. I have seen very little of the meritocracy that Aaron blogs about.

It's not easy ~~being green~~ running a ground-breaking project

I've run my share of groundbreaking software projects in my life. It's really not an easy task. Having vision, managing employees/committers, building community, and satisfying users all takes a bit of attitude that pisses people off. Let's look at what DHH did with Rails:

He blew away most of the other web frameworks by demonstrating that web development could be concise and that web apps could be built to be visually pleasing and easy to use without a ton of developer time. That, IMHO, puts him in diety territory.

He built an ecosystem around Rails that had enough critical mass to spawn a whole industry around Rails development.

And the 37 Signals apps don't suck.

But doing all that requires making choices. DHH made a series of choices about style, community building, etc. Some people think he's a jerk... but the same can be said about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Halsey Minor and other folks who fundamentally changed the game (yeah, I'm lumping DHH in league with those guys.) In my opinion, DHH is not a one trick pony (Folks who built the future). He's got direction, attitude, energy, charisma, and the other stuff that it takes to change the game, and he'd done just that.

And in the other corner, weighing 98 pounds...

Now, let's look at the ASF. It's a nice place to house a project. There are lots of reports to write. In fact, I believe more time is spent on the ESME project writing monthly reports than writing code. The ASF has done nothing to help the ESME folks build community or inspire folks to join the project. There's been little in the way of technical guidance. Sure there's brand and visibility in having an ASF project, but there's no meritocracy. There's nothing that I've seen in the ASF that rewards anything other than being nice and writing reports and having statistics get better. Sure, if I'm Yahoo! and I want to open source Hadoop and pay my developers to work on it, Apache is a nice neutral place to house it. CouchDB is high on the doesn't suck scale, but I gotta say, Damien Katz is the personality behind it (no, he's not as acerbic as DHH) and without him, CouchDB would not be (violating the ASF guidelines, but I guess they needed a flashy project).

Further, let's look at the ASF crap pile. Well, there's the HTTP server... so bogged down in commityism that Nginx blows it away. Struts... the ultimate piece of crap web framework. ActiveMQ... junk compared to RabbitMQ. Tomcat, consistently behind Jetty (a personality driven show.) There's no real merit that I can see across the board in Apache's offerings. Put another way, if the ASF were a meritocracy, they'd dump the crap that's in their top-level projects.

Yes, I think that the Rails community could be a nicer place to be. I've tried to build the Lift community so that it's a warmer and more welcoming place to be than the Rails community. But I am sure glad Lift is not part of the ASF. I tip my hat to DHH and what he's built.

Party and (likely) flame on.

Posted by David Pollak in Ruby at 06:16 | Comments (15) | Trackbacks (0)

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I have used Rails on a a few personal projects and looked at the implementation a bit. DHH is a master craftsman and Rails is a fine example of how to build a useful framework without giving in to the temptation of useless abstractions leading to over-engineered crap that is so prevalent in software development. While it may not meet everybody's idea of framework design, it is worthy of study by people who wish to design frameworks.

Quite a few Apache projects exhibit symptoms of design by committee and over engineering. Apache Axis2 is so riddled with bugs that we had to replace its use with CXF. The sad thing is, the herd is behind ASF and a lot of fine open source gets less consideration than they deserve.

Err.. where is the objective evaluation of technologies practiced?

#1 Praki Prakash on 2009-04-29 08:35 (Reply)

Ouch...

I don't think all of your tech comparisons are entirely fair. Different products target different but overlapping use cases and markets.

As for ESME, well, I think it's kind of in a catch-22 situation. On one hand it's received lots of press as an enterprise application and has landed in an organization designed for mature projects; on the other the codebase is a rock-star crafted prototype designed for internet deployment that quite likely should be rewritten from the ground up while that's still a small, manageable task. And, to make matters more interesting, it seems like over half the ESME community development are non-developers who are full of opinions. That's great for crafting direction, but honestly if a good developer wants to have someone telling him what he should be coding, he probably also wants to be paid. So it's not good for building the developer side of the community.

#2 Erik Engbrecht (Homepage) on 2009-04-29 08:54 (Reply)

Yeah, the ESME codebase needs to be re-written. No doubt about it. It was a 2 week hack on my part that's continued.

The take-away is not the code base, but is the lack of guidance for Anne and Dick about building community around the project. Nobody from the ASF is helping them sustain or build momentum or community.

#2.1 David Pollak on 2009-04-29 08:59 (Reply)

I think it is about the codebase. An open source project, especially a young one, needs a leader who makes substantial high-quality code contributions. This establishes the top of the meritocracy. ESME doesn't have that because you and Vassil don't have the free bandwidth.

If there was an established production ready codebase, then you probably could serve as kind of a guide while others picked it up. It would be worthwhile to pick it up because of the value of the code that is already there. But with a prototype level codebase there's very little incentive to contribute versus starting your own project.

The leader needs to be a developer, and the leader's contributions to the project need to be clear.

Anne and Dick can't play that role. That's not saying they don't have a valuable role to play, just that there is a critical piece missing from the team. I don't think ESME can take off until someone who is both good and has sufficient time steps in to play that role. I also think in a typical ASF incubator project that person is already there, and it's a matter of building a community around that person. That person is like the scaffolding for the community. So I don't think it's reasonable to expect ASF to help them find a person to fill that role.

#2.1.1 Erik Engbrecht (Homepage) on 2009-04-29 09:57 (Reply)

I'm not sure about the leader being a developer.

Anne was the inspiration for ESME. She recruited a bunch of folks and crystallized the project a year ago. She was inspirational.

Dick is an awesome process guy and the two of them could inspire, recruit (as they did with me), and lead.

Nobody at the ASF has been coaching them on how to do this.

Nobody at the ASF is focused on "shipping" ESME. We had a fork in the road at the beginning of the year when we bit off a lot more than we could chew in an iteration and fell on our faces. That drained momentum and should not have happened.

Nobody at the ASF is helping with process other than "write some reports."

I believe in Anne and Dick and I might have to be the one to step up and whisper in their ear and help them do what they need to do. I sure would have expected the ASF mentors to do so.

#2.1.1.1 David Pollak (Homepage) on 2009-04-29 10:57 (Reply)

I suggest you start whispering. I don't think anyone at ASF knows what they should be doing. AFAIK ASF projects are all led by developers, not analysts. In fact, I can't think of any OSS projects led by non-developers.

But that doesn't mean it can't be done. I just don't see the path, other than perhaps Siemens, SAP, or some other sponsor paying people to write the code. Which, of course, would fit with other ASF projects.

#2.1.1.1.1 Erik Engbrecht (Homepage) on 2009-04-29 12:11 (Reply)

The ASF might have crappy software, but that doesn't automatically mean that being inappropriate should be encouraged. And Rails is a great piece of software that changed the world. But for me the whole point is not about technical merit at all or even about being a rock-star programmer. It's not even about being nice.

It's about marketing. "A bit of attitude" when you're managing the project or discussing technical decisions is fine. But when people expect to see your best (presumably what you want to see on public conferences and presentations), your choice of words/imagery will have a huge impact. Being surprised means poor marketing on your part.

We will never know what the Ruby community could have been if they lack the arrogant attitude. But I refuse to believe that a "Fuck you" on a public presentation is what it takes to change the world (the link is on J Aaron Farr's blog post).

Incidentally, Kathy Sierra noted a while ago that it's great to be creative, but not rude, arrogant or self-centered when you market- even to geeks:

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/08/geek_marketing_.html

#3 Vassil Dichev on 2009-04-29 15:11 (Reply)

I read Aaron's post to say, "We at Apache have the same level of creativity that the Rails community has, but without the attitude." That in my opinion is absolutely wrong.

The ASF has not created an environment of creativity, boundary-pushing, or energy.

DHH and the Rails community have.

Personally, I'm less brash than I was 20 years ago, but I've gotten over my "be nice to everyone" phase. I recognized about 3 years ago that technology leadership involves pissing some people off. Maybe DHH and the Rails community pisses off more people than they absolutely have to, but it's a matter of degree.

So, the ASF is a nice place to put a corporate project, but not to innovate. The Rails community (and perhaps the Scala and Lift communities) are places where technology boundaries are pushed. That's going to upset some people, and in my opinion, that's okay.

#3.1 David Pollak (Homepage) on 2009-04-30 06:48 (Reply)

Hi David,

While I agree that Rails was really refreshing back then and DHH made a fantastic job with both the community and 37s that does not mean that rails was/is the only important player in town (django started almost the same time as rails and django is like rails without the attitude;) ).

Also, maybe the ASF was not the best example, but I definitely disagree with the notion that being rude/edgy/arrogant/macho is the only way to lead a very successful software project and community.

There are many leaders who managed significant projects without DHH-like attitude/manners: many google devs, django, lift;), scala, python, ruby and jruby community leaders etc.

(and finally, I certainly would not put DHH in the elite group)

#4 pk11 on 2009-04-30 11:01 (Reply)

You are biased. None of the other community could have begin & done something, without ASF (you need a platform and something is there to start).

ASF Http server is really backbone for 55+% of internet.

Tomcat, I have seen bank's and financialy institutions are relying on it.

Don't kick elders, once you are able to find pretty women . Few things have to tested by time too.

#5 Mohan (Homepage) on 2009-05-01 18:03 (Reply)

My comment was directly in response to J Aaron Farr's blog post. But for rock stars and BDFLs pushing the envelope and making good decisions, we would not have computing as we know it. But for stability and backwards compatibility, we would not have computing as we know it. But Aarron fails to understand that there is value in DHH and his brand of things and that it leads for far more innovation than the ASF does and more than the ASF ever will.

Oh... and in terms of elders, I oddly enough, am one. I've been doing commercial software since 1977... and I've got software that I started writing in 1991 that is still in production and still being developed and enhanced.

#5.1 David Pollak on 2009-05-03 09:44 (Reply)

I don't think I've ever pointed out a spelling or grammatical error on a blog before but this one made me laugh.

If DHH is in "diety" territory does that mean he's got a weight control problem?

Okay you make an interesting point but to compare Rails and Apache to justify the shit attitude that DHH has is a falacy of epic proportions.

To bring the oft-used dictator metaphor up: its akin to saying Stalin was a cool guy with attitude when you compare him to the genocidal maniac Mao Zedong.

It doesn't work.

Comparing two positions is shaky ground and the fact is based on cultural norms and ideals - not software.

DHH considers the behaviour in that conference acceptable. He has a well-documented attitude problem. None of these can be glazed over or made okay by the fact that the "Apache Foundation suck more". It's a nonsense.

#6 Doug @ Straw Dogs (Homepage) on 2009-05-02 03:52 (Reply)

Being an ASF mentor for the incubation of ESME, I'm happy to discuss the "nobody at the ASF has been coaching them on how to do this" bit.

But not here - that discussion belongs to the esme-dev mailing list (http://incubator.apache.org/esme/community/mail-lists.html), so I'll start a thread there right now.

#7 Bertrand Delacretaz (Homepage) on 2009-05-02 07:38 (Reply)

Started the discussion on esme-dev, http://markmail.org/message/5hjeyd46agmeved7

#8 Bertrand Delacretaz (Homepage) on 2009-05-02 07:53 (Reply)

Please don't get me wrong, I'm defending Struts use in 2009 - but how on earth can you compare Rails and Struts in the same sentence? Struts is like nearly 10 years old! It was one of the first Web Frameworks in existence!

#9 Antony Stubbs (Homepage) on 2009-07-29 15:10 (Reply)

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