RR 428: Arming the Rebels with Rails 6 Featuring David Heinemeier Hansson

Today’s guest is David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and co founder and CTO at Basecamp. This episode is focused on the release of Rails 6. David talks about the process of getting from Rails 5 to Rails 6 and some of the new features and frameworks in Rails 6. David describes some of the new features as ‘magical, which some people don’t like. He believes that the ‘magical’ element is a good thing because it reduces the learning curve for newcomers, so you can less time studying and more time being productive. This is important because it allows people from other platforms to jump on. Rails 6 will provide users with more frameworks so that they do not have to build all of their own solutions to common problems. David delves into how Ruby goes against the grain by providing tools and how that coincides with their philosophy. He talks about the process for deciding which problems the core team is going to tackle, how they come out of Basecamp, and Basecamp’s methodology in terms of what tools they decide to build. The panel discusses how deviating from the Rails core is almost an antipattern and how having the tools provided for them has improved their experience with Rails.