An Opinionated Programmer
Recently Lex Fridman posted a podcast episode of his discussion with DHH (Duration 6hr+). I have previously written about another such Fridman interview- that with John Carmack. DHH is a legendary programmer. Known for his work on Ruby On Rails (RoR). You have read about him here more than once. In fact, the oldest post on this blog was about his sensible but controversial opinion. (Well, I had written a few blog posts before that one. I used wordpress for blogging then. But when migrating to/ starting with GitHub pages, those earlier posts did not seem to have stood the test of time.)
He is not limited to RoR. He is an influencer in the programmer community. He is very opinionated. And having acquired an aura and followers due to RoR work, he exerts influence in a few other areas as well. And he is quite noisy. I mean it as a compliment. For example, he created a lot of noise against App Store 30% payment rules (All app payments must go thr’ Apple and Apple will take 30% of the amount).
DHH is not an abstract-to-concrete thinker like Alan Kay or Rich Hickey (deep-thinking-as-an-activity types). But software is an opinionated world and we need such noisy people. Sane people like Grady Booch, Martin Fowler, Gary Marcus, etc. Not all are as noisy as DHH. But we need strongly put counter opinions most of the time. Otherwise we will drown in the deafening noise created by other folks (Software Craftsmanship BS proponents, Agile consultants, Silicon Valley VCs, AWS certified cloud architects, AI hype-men/ doomsayers, LinkedIn fiction writers).
(There might be some but) There does not seem to be any malice against the entity he is crusading against at a particular time. For example, these days he seems to be anti-Apple, but when M1 chips came out, he was quite vocal how they outperformed the best chips of the time. He was quite smitten by iPhone javascript performance and praised Safari in the past. But that is not limited to Apple. He has been quite noisy about how his company saved millions by moving out of AWS onto their own servers in professionally managed data centers. But he does not seem to be against everything Amazon/ AWS. He has been supportive of how Musk handled twitter. But he’s called Musk delusional as well.
One thing he mentions in this interview with Fridman is that he being an introvert never liked to pair program with another programmer but these days AI helps him as a pair programmer. I did not think of DHH as an introvert. This is the thing… He knows how to be opinionated and when to create noise, etc. He wrote that ‘TDD is dead’ post some days before his rubyconf keynote. He started App Store payment noise just ahead of WWDC. He started talking about SSR when they were about to launch Hey. Can such person be an introvert?*
He is rich and can afford luxury. He can also afford luxury beliefs but does not seem to have many such beliefs. He is not a tech bro but at times does sound like one. And there was that smear-campaign like ‘basecamp funny names’ thing shortly after he testified against Apple.
I don’t agree with everything he says. For example, static vs dynamic typing from the interview. In fact, I don’t even read everything he writes on his blog. But a lot of what he says makes actual sense. He is one of those very few people in software, who you can agree with, and yet choose not to be dogmatic followers/ bhakt of the person or everything they say.
*Marcus Geduld made this point about introverts. I find it insightful. When I was writing about DHH saying he’s an introvert, I remembered Marcus Geduld immediately. I must have read that answer some 8-10 years ago so I was not sure whether it’s by Marcus or my memory was playing tricks on me. But google search and quora related content helped me find this link quickly.