Extracting Rails

from Basecamp

David Heinemeier Hansson

In the beginning, there was the application

We embraced our constraints

Less people, more power

Less money, more value

Less resources, better use

Less time, better time

We built half a product

instead of a half-ass product

Less Software

Why Yet Another Web Framework?

Work with me here

Stepping outside the sweet spots

Cutting against the grain

Too much enterprise

Too much focus on the 99.999’s

Not enough on the 98’s

Too much focus on the 100-man shops

Not enough on the 1/4-man shops

Liberate the good ideas

Change the language

Change the context

Retain the core insights

Call me shallow

Aesthetics

Joy

Less

An Extraction

There’s no other way

I’ll know it when I see it

You have to feel an API to make it fit

Design matters more than test in TDD

Guessing the future is for fortune tellers

Why open source?

For entirely selfish reasons

Make others do the work

Bask in the glow of being a giver

What’s there to loose?

It works!

1,000 patches in 9 months

Extract, pass, reap, rinse, repeat

Getting traction

Fear obscurity

You need a network to reap the effects

Passion is infectious

The baseline of excitement

A conversation of success

Go looking for trouble

Tout advantages over the known

“If it bleeds, it leads”

Dealing with traction

Scaling a culture

Early influx can bend you out of shape

Release not so early, then often

Set a viral example of kindness

Any questions?

david@loudthinking.com

37signals.combasecampHQ.com

rubyonrails.org