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.com
basecampHQ.com
rubyonrails.org