RUG::B

DHH, our lord and savior - just kidding, but I quite like him, actually, as without Rails and the famous (?) Hartl tutorial, I maybe never would have gotten started in Development - the inventor of Rails, successful founder of Basecamp (a company that famously got money from Jeff Bezos early on, but never took VC, as is often mentioned, even though it could have), showing an alternative path to success then the typical startup route, is a man of MANY (political) opinions, on US politics* and TRUMP, but sometimes also matters elsewhere, for example that Rails scales well at Shopify etc., if you believe his Twitter and retweets. I kinda, like that. Sometimes he also gets into "Twitter fights", with our big names in Tech, even Elon Musk at some points, I think, over who is (supposed to be) an idol for people in tech or so (is he maybe jealous? j/k - I doubt it but don't know, lets try to find out!), or about the so-called hustle porn by people like Gary V, the startup ideology and working conditions at... many companies other than Basecamp, basically.

• he lives in the US, mostly, and only spends some time in Spain and his native Denmark, of course, I think. He also likes to race long-distance race cars, how very... un-environmental of him... ;)

By reading through tweets, talks and interviews of DHH, I will try to dissect, analyse (so you don't have to) and present to you: 1) How Danish politics look like, as I quite like comparative politics, to see which political ideas probably mainly influenced DHH. (Or if he's rather influenced by other nordic or Germanic countries politics' possibly?) 2) How he is criticising Trump and when he started with that. 3) Who he most closely supported in the US democrats presidential primaries, early on, when there was still a bunch of candidates, and who he might have switched to when. (Because I quite like following US politics and I am curious myself)

Afterwards, we can a make short Ruby Berlin-internal polls or votes on who supports Biden and who doesn't / wouldn't vote for him, who should be his running woman - he committed to a woman to Vice President already and there's a couple arguably options, most being varying shades of "lefty" and from different backgrounds. (https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/16/politics/biden-potential-running-mates/index.html)

In a second shorter part, I would also like to discuss the anti-VC ideology of Basecamp and maybe compare to other Rails-powered companies that DHH also frequently mentions, who maybe took VC, but were outside of a major tech hub, like Shopify, which supposedly also helped them and how DHH maybe influenced @tobi from Shopify and some others. (https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242199230783488) I also want to use this part to introduce indiehackers.com a bit, ask who is an indy hacker in our community, or who would like to build something - without taking investor money - as I would not mind finding someone to work on a (Ruby) side project with. Indiehackers is part of Stripe since some time, the developers of Sorbet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripe_(company)#Sorbet) - maybe a good time to look at the current status of that type checker for Ruby again briefly?!

In the end, we can make some... arbitrary comparisons of Rails and different other Ruby frameworks to the dominant political ideologies of our time on Twitter. If Rails is Danish Socialism, what is Sinatra? Is it more... neoliberal, because it is more bare bones and doesn't have many conventions? What is Rack? Anarchy?!? What about Trailblazer? What about Padrino, Hanami or Grape? And so on.

I promise that this talk will be more fun and less somber and serious than the last one, but also contain at least 100% more Ruby / coding stuff than the last one... and if only in the last part. ;) I think there will be lots of ideological points about Rails scaling well and I will look for the most "impressive" tweets about that lately, around Procore's IPO, for example. (Nate Berkopec maintainer of Puma, on this: https://twitter.com/nateberkopec/status/1250551255862149120)