Robby speaks with David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH), Creator of Ruby on Rails and CTO of Basecamp / HEY.
Disclaimer: Robby sat down with DHH in early March 2021 about ~5-6 weeks before Basecamp's policy changes were announced and the significant impact that had within our community. It's quite likely that some of Basecamp's internal software engineering processes have since changed.
Topics covered
- Why we should celebrate legacy software as a victory..that means it was successful
- Why Basecamp has opted to release new versions of their Saas vs iterating on a single version
- How Basecamp handles pure maintenance work and accounts for security backports
- A high-level intro into ShapeUp and how Basecamp/HEY's team manages bugs and follow-up work during their two-week cooldowns
- Why Basecamp has a Security Infrastructure Performance (SIP) team that deals with tipping points, security patches, and reactive work
- Basecamp's Research & Fidelity team that focuses on building and extracting frameworks
- Why hasn't Ruby on Rails undergone a major rewrite?
- What types of testing does DHH find to provide the most value for effort in their Ruby on Rails applications?
- DHH's thoughts on Test-Driven Development (TDD)
- How budgeting is more valuable than estimating
- What is Ruby on Rails competitive advantage in the current field of technology platforms?
- Ruby on Rails isn't a talking-point anymore and why that is not a problem
Book Recommendation: "The Manual" by Epictetus
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