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Hello everyone, this is David Heinemeier Hansson. I'm sorry I can't be with you all at RailsConf.
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Kansas, this is a fantastic year to be at RailsConf, and I'm really sad to miss it.
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We have Rails 5 almost ready to roll. In fact, maybe the release candidate will even drop during one of these days.
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But in my stead, you have something perhaps even better: Jeremy Daer.
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I've worked with Jeremy since 2004 on Ruby on Rails, the framework itself.
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He is one of the few, actually I think perhaps the only person who's still around from the inaugural core team.
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He has commits to the framework going back all the way to 2004.
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So when people ask if you need 10 years or more of Ruby on Rails experience, Jeremy is one of the very few people who can say, "Oh yep, got it."
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In addition to that, of course, I’ve worked with him at Basecamp for many, many years now.
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It's been an absolute pleasure.
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Jeremy is one of the very best programmers I know. Whenever there's anything I can't figure out, Jeremy is usually the person I tap and ask.
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So, you're in for a real treat, and I hope you all have a fantastic RailsConf in Kansas.
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I will see you all next year. Enjoy! Jeers, David.
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Thanks! No pressure, right? Well, thank you, David.
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He stole a bunch of the stuff I need to explain about why David's not here.
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I’m not David, I’m Jeremy.
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It has been ten years, and it's really kind of boggling to look back at that.
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It was a city here in the conference room full of anticipation.
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We had a company meetup last week with Basecamp, and we were also looking back at where we've come from and where we want Basecamp to go.
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I think Rails has a lot of parallels with that.
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I was feeling it was kind of interesting: what can you say about something like Rails?
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My impulse—I mean, I work on Rails, I helped build Rails, I helped other people build Rails, and that's what I really love about it.
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So my impulse is to talk about what's going into Rails, what's next for Rails.
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I can give a litany of all the sweet things and features that we want for Basecamp.
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But really, I love Rails itself, the community that's formed around it, the kind of business we've been able to build around it.
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The kind of team that we run because we assume that software like this is normal.
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Looking back, David in 2008 talked about the great surplus, and I'm going to talk about that some more.
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We’re here for Rails 5, of course, and to me, it feels like Rails 5 already happened.
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Basecamp 3 is running it.
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We’ve been really pushing to make Rails 5 the best it can be for Basecamp, and I think it's also going to be the best for all of your apps.
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David kind of tripped me up thinking about time with Basecamp.
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I know a lot of you have also had similar tenure and experience with people you’re close to—coding partners, business partners, people you’ve seen come and go.
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You may have been rejoined later. I remember back in the dot-com era, before Rails, depending on where you lived, you could recycle.
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You’d see somebody that you had left and missed; you’d see them again six months or a year later.
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There’s a kind of camaraderie in that, especially in the face of difficulties.
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After Rail's emergence, it was the first time I really participated in an open-source way.
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It’s something I wouldn’t have even known to look for, but it blossomed around me.
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I learned to help others, which is what I came to enjoy about it.
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But first, we've got to get back to a couple of misconceptions that David's already cleared up.
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I'm not DHH, and you know the saying goes.
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There are a few hard things in computer science: naming, caching, and concurrency.
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So we can say that we hit a race condition.
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David is racing in the six-hours of spa.
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I don’t actually know how to say this because it seems like saying 'spa' would not be a thing.
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Like, 'spa' is a place and 'spot' is a thing you get in this league.
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But it’s a place he does these long endurance races.
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If you're interested in cheering him along, you can find him on Twitter at DHH Racing.
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He has a separate Twitter account because there's so much racing.
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I'm sorry, Aaron, I warned you before, but this was the primo pun! And no more puns, I swear.
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So, I'm here to dispense with this GitHub Twitter, and you may also notice.
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You might have known me as Jeremy Kemper. I'm not Kemper anymore.
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I got married to Renee Davis last year and we combined our surnames.
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So now we're Renee Daer and Jeremy Daer. I give a shout out to the state of California and the Name Equality Act.
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Reflecting again on Basecamp, I've been at Basecamp for nine years now.
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You know, it seems like an eternity to me, and it really isn't.
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You hear all the time about people retiring after a 35-year career doing something, and here my tenure is just a blip.
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I don't even know how to think about that yet.
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My first day still feels like yesterday, even though I can also start thinking about the details of what I did.
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Those chunks of my career, the things I've forgotten, snowballed into what has become a career.
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My first project was a search engine, using e-commerce software at the time.
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And reflecting, I think it was something like five years later I was working on a search engine again.
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What's happening here?
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Ten years later, I’m going to avoid the search engines and focus on Ruby on Rails.
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Something I don't really know how to synthesize or make sense of yet.
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Because Ruby on Rails has been around now for going on half of my career as a programmer.
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But okay, we're here to talk about Rails 5.
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So here I am. You're all building Rails.
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Most of you are on Rails 2.
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Yes, there’s a big pain—a great discontinuity—the meteor strike was Rails 3.
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And I will say that we still run Rails 2 apps at Basecamp.
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That's part of our legacy, something we've chosen to fully embrace.
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Even knowing the hue and cry about the real problems with running Rails 2 apps.
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We run some apps on Ruby 1.8 and 1.8.7 REE.
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So we take on a greater kind of responsibility for our legacy and their past.
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But at the same time, we make our greatest efforts to stay current, especially with new development.
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I'm not going to talk too much about Rails 5 right now.
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This was my impulse; I made a talk that focused mostly on new features.
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Let's get that out of the way: Action Cable is pretty cool.
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I was initially a real Action Cable doubter because I thought, like WebSockets?
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You know WebSockets, they were kind of cool, but I hadn't used them much.
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But, HTTP 2—is this the leap forward? But the fact is WebSockets work great today.
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They are at their sweet spot—the prime of their life—on their tech curve.
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Trying to use them even two years ago was a total hassle.
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Everybody was implementing it differently under various versions.
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There were complex libraries to handle all kinds of fallback mechanisms.
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You had a big split on whether to start with a simple technique and upgrade to more sophisticated ones.
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But these days, in most browsers, most of the time, WebSockets totally work and do so for the things we need.
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We designed mainly around being able to push and publish updates to people.
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We’ve done it in past apps; it’s not a new idea.
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The new thing is that this is part of the framework.
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Working with these tools is like working with any other part of Rails.
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You build a controller—it's what I know.
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I think about my interaction with resources and how Action Cable integrates in the same way.
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Rather than building one-off features, I now see opportunities to rely on it.
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There are two other important features of Rails 5 that are selling points.
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First is the Rails Code of Conduct.
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We chose to adopt a code of conduct.
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Reflecting on this, we see why it exists and the perspective of asking—why do this?
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This should be a norm for the community.
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As we made that decision, we took a step back to consider what it's like to work with Rails.
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We should know what to expect as new contributors, especially when they submit their first pull request.
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We’d really like to see this reflected throughout the Rails community.
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It's huge—not just the Rails committers—but it’s the broader community.
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Historically, the Rails IRC room has bucked the trend, creating a welcoming environment.
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We’ve somehow set a tone to keep it a good place to learn.
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You can read about the code of conduct online at ruby on rails.org/doctrine.
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This is a first draft of the things that we value in working on Rails together.
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We hope you do too.
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The third feature is a new start page.
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When you create a new Rails app, there's a redesigned start page.
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I really should have put a photo here.
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One of our designers at Basecamp, Jamie DeHenson, redesigned the Ruby on Rails website in time for Rails 5.
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Timely for Rails Doctrine and for the code of conduct.
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Thank you to him for redoing all of that for us.
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If you start a new Rails 5 app, just wait for it.
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I said I wasn’t going to get too deep into Rails 5 features.
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I wanted to talk about the how land of Rails—how we got here.
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This is the questioning I went there: 'How I Rails 5 my Rails?'
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Last week, meeting up with everybody from Basecamp, we were remote, getting together every six months.
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Also, had the opportunity to discuss why Basecamp, why Basecamp 3?
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Now, okay, I've got this little splinter in my mind, so indulge me for a second.
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Seriously, what's up with this? This is literally a problem I was pondering a couple of nights ago.
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I thought about this before; it’s kind of a knowledge that stuck in my head.
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What does Kansas City, Missouri, what did they move? Did the river like shift around and the border changed?
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There’s gotta be a reason, right? Some kind of engineering solution.
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So I looked it up—in case any of you have had the same splinter pitch here.
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In the 1830s, Kansas was founded as a Missouri River port town.
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The Missouri River blocked all of Kansas.
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Kansas River comes in from the west, so let's call it Kansas after the river.
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Cool story: Kansas didn't exist at that time; Missouri did.
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The river was named after the native Kanza tribe, also known as the Kansas.
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In 1854, Kansas Territory was established.
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Okay, now we’ve got a town called Kansas and a territory called Kansas.
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This got confusing for people in the town of Kansas.
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So they renamed Kansas the City of Kansas to clarify that it’s different from Kansas.
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When Kansas became a state in 1861, there was no problem and no confusion.
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Kansas City of Kansas—Kansas Territory.
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Okay, 28 years later, for some reason in 1889, we have Kansas City.
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Who knows? Where's Kansas City now? So we have Kansas City on the Kansas River next to Kansas.
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By the way, there’s a Kansas City in Kansas right across the river.
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So now that we've cleared that up.
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Okay, back to Rails 5.
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This is a huge release. This is the release that launches Basecamp 3. It also launches Action Cable, Turbolinks 5, and brings Active Job.
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Active Job has been around since Rails 4.2, but now it really comes into full bloom.
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It changes the way you build apps, and you will probably reach for Active Job a lot more frequently.
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Action Cable, in particular, is accepting a ton of connections.
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What happens when you’ve got 10,000 connections in one process and you start trying to do stuff?
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You’ll block everything that’s happening on that server.
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The typical response is you want to offload any kind of processing as soon as possible.
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The interaction you’re going to see with Action Cable channels is to give me a job instantly.
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Otherwise, you’re going to be blocking everything that’s happening on your server.
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This is also the Rails that introduces a full API mode.
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This means the locus of chief of your control in your app.
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If you want to move it to another service, if you want Rails to be a collaborator to another place.
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If you want to implement something other than Rails, it works in the browser.
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The way Rails works remains fundamentally the same; you're thinking in terms of resources.
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You think restfully, and none of that changes.
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This is particularly something true for some of our larger Rails businesses.
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As they've grown, they’ve embraced other platforms, especially if they’re multi-team.
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If you’re a medium-sized company that can accommodate iOS, Android, and decide to round the browser.
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It’s almost isomorphic to having a client on other platforms.
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Treating the browser as a platform in itself is probably the biggest change I feel in Basecamp 3.
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It's a transition to Turbolinks 5, which is very personal to Basecamp and the way we work.
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We couldn’t contemplate creating an Android app on top of what we're already building.
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Or creating an iOS app on top of what we've built.
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A team can only do so much and must make choices about what you do.
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Especially a small team that feels the pressure to grow can face a lot of challenges.
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So, after the pressure of maybe needing an app, how do you handle it?
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Well, you grow into being a larger company or team to tackle those challenges.
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We took a different path, and I think it’s something a younger Basecamp may not have done.
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We second-guessed ourselves and doubted several times along the way.
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Hitting some gnarly roadblocks while building partnerships.
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Turbolinks team and our iOS and Android developers made it through.
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Part of Basecamp 3 and Rails 5 is the paired release of Turbolinks 5.
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Turbolinks 5 comes with iOS and Android bridges.
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This allows you to build your Android and iOS hybrid apps on top of your mobile apps.
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Think of your Rails app as a resource; you don’t need to build a complete separate experience.
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If your team already has mobile development, this is a plus.
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So enough about Turbolinks 5, how do we get here?
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I’m thinking back on my rails.
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Why Rails 5? Here’s my first thought: David's Circuit 2003.
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Seems legit, right? David isn’t here to vet this.
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So it’s not wrong, is it? But we can take a closer look.
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There is an element of truth, but really, the story of Rails 5 is also the story of Rails 1.
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The early days show us where we’ve been and the opportunities we have.
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Take a look: David in 2003—it’s not just that we need to build Basecamp.
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There’s a sense of opportunity, something that can be done.
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A single person could create something incredible with ten hours of time a week.
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Even thinking back, how does Basecamp form in XML?
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Now we have Rails formed.
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There's truth to this, and it's kind of glib.
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Working with David over the years; it's not too far off interdisciplinary.
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There’s a higher expectation—wanting to maximize tools.
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Being impatient with roadblocks.
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It’s recognizing that taking the longer-term view can lead to habitual problems.
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It’s about more than happiness; it’s about fluency.
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It’s love for the language and the community that has grown around it.
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Ruby is my native tongue.
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In a tech world where you’re supposed to be a polyglot, the specialness of Ruby feels like home.
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I really feel it’s like developing another layer of personal relationship with our tools.
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I like other languages; I love Ruby.
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It's wonderful to write and read.
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But it’s a different story than coming home and opening an editor.
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What about the first step? Why Rails? It’s simple: Basecamp needed to be built.
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But Basecamp started as a PHP prototype. David wanted a quick solution.
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He got frustrated along the way and decided this wasn’t feasible.
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So, he built Rails.
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This is where my story with Basecamp and Rails joins.
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I had my own story with Rails before Basecamp.
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I was doing freelance work, dabbling with PHP and Java.
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I liked Ruby, but I found it to be something special.
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For fun, I would explore how I could implement projects in Ruby.
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Often, the Ruby libraries felt like pale copies of other languages.
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It felt like building in Java servlets but writing Ruby instead.
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Then Rails came along.
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It was an eye-opener, bringing together productive web development end to end.
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It wasn’t just a vision; it was a way to create and use Ruby.
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It's hard to deny that I could see myself in this vision.
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I worked at CD Baby and had my own Rails moment.
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I was looking for like-minded individuals who shared this passion for Rails.
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Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby, reached out to me.
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It was like manna from heaven
