The Evolution of Rails with David Heinemeier Hansson

“Actually it’s more work to turn a table into a chair, than it is to just make a damn chair.”

Ruby on Rails is a web app framework released 10 years ago that influenced the way websites were being built. Rails skyrocketed to popularity in the late 2000’s and empowered many small companies to quickly build and maintain robust web apps.

While it is still a mainstay in web development, it has been overshadowed as of late by JavaScript, and Node.js on the backend. David joins Software Engineering Daily to discuss how Ruby on Rails has evolved to keep up with newer programming paradigms and why it is still an excellent choice to build web apps with nowadays.

David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of Ruby on Rails and a partner at Basecamp. Rails was extracted from the work done at Basecamp, and open-sourced for the public to commit to and use for their applications.

Questions

• How has the world of software engineering changed since Rails was first open sourced 10 years ago?
• Are there any canonical problems that have driven Rails over the last decade?
• Why did you rewrite Basecamp from scratch?
• Which programming language best fits your brain?
• What is the difference between software writing and software engineering?
• What are the practices of software development that are pseudoscientific?
• Why do startup founders feel compelled to raise so much money when costs are historically low?

Links

• Basecamp
• Ruby on Rails
• AJAX
• Technical Bankruptcy
• Web 2.0
• CoffeeScript
• RailsConf 2014 – Keynote: Writing Software by David Heinemeier Hansson
• Reconsider
• Zero to One
• David’s personal page
  

The post The Evolution of Rails with David Heinemeier Hansson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.