DHH, Ruby Central, and the Current Problems

The other day, one of my social media mutuals, who I met through our shared love of the Blue Jays, posted about DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson), noting that so many male colleagues over the years had called her a bitch for calling him out.

I'm a bit out of the loop. I remember he was embroiled in the Basecamp "talking politics on the company slack will get you fired :) :)" thing back in 2021, which is honestly enough to glean exactly what his politics is. But then he dropped off my radar, because I'm not in the Rails world, I haven't written anything in Ruby in probably ten years (though we use it at work, just not my own particular team), and haven't really cared about it since zed shaw's "Learn Ruby the Hard Way" was making the rounds a long time ago. I dismissed him as yet another tech guy who was a piece of shit to work with.

Turns out I was right, and in the meantime, he got worse. Or at least felt emboldened to show his ass. Recently on his blog, he wrote a post about how he remembered London. Spoiler alert: white and speaking English. It's "no longer full of native Brits", according to Hansson. He then goes to talk in glowing terms about Tommy Robinson, noted Islamophobe (who, interestingly, was born Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon - talk about branding yourself for your audience!). And on. And on.

It's dull and it's tired, the same sort of shit that started to play out on Eric Raymond (ESR)'s blog a couple decades ago, when 9/11 happened and that pompous braggart, who wrote not only early Open Source texts but also cringey sex guides for inept men (google "sex tips for geeks"), basically devoted himself to Islamophobic and racist writing (google "eric raymond black low iq"). That was enough for me, then, with ESR. This is enough for me, now, with David Heinemeier Hansson.

I'm not the only one who's noticed, obviously. David Celis writes a thoughtful post on why it's vital that Rails move towards a new and better governance. But that aside, the Ruby/Rails community seems to have really been going through it lately, with Ruby Central launching what looks to the outside eye like a takeover of RubyGems (the community hosting service for Ruby packages, known as gems). People are leaving. As David Celis writes, the whole situation reeks of incompetence. The community, from an outsider's perspective, looks bad. The events and blog posts and &c over the last several weeks seem to confirm the same. Rails is rotten. But the people at the top probably think they're doing great things.

I feel like how Ruby, and Rails, comes out of this over the coming months is going to define how the community is seen for the next decade. Whether it's an ecosystem with a deep community, as it always was before, or whether things are defacto dictated by DHH, and Shopify, and a small cadre of people and companies with particularly odious views. I hope, but don't expect, that those at the top think about that. Because once a project has that kind of stink, it's almost impossible to wash away.