David Heinemeier Hansson joins Shopify's board

54 pointsposted a year ago
by doppp
(shopify.com)

18 Comments

Alifatisk

a year ago

I find it faschinating how much Shopify has invested in Ruby / Rails, at what point will Shopify just merge with the Ruby Team?

dismalaf

a year ago

Probably never. DHH wants to keep Rails small enough that a 1 person founder can use it and be productive with it. Shopify is already massive and some of their projects are taking them in a different direction than DHH wants for Rails. For example, Liquid templates (which are intentionally less powerful than ERB since they're designed to be used by Shopify store owners) and Sorbet (DHH hates types).

Onavo

a year ago

Their pet web framework remix is also quite underfunded compared to Next.js

gedy

a year ago

DHH joining won't help that I suspect

ksec

a year ago

> Sorbet (DHH hates types).

I believe Sorbet is from Stripe?

dismalaf

a year ago

Ugh, all the companies that start with S and use Ruby. My bad. Got thrown off because they have Sorbet stuff in Ruby LSP and other Sorbet tools. They have 1.1k Github repos... Lots of TS, Go, Rust and lots of non-Rails things...

fjyasdlkjw

a year ago

I hope this leads to DHH adopting Sorbet into Rails given Shopify has a strong interest in it.

On second thought, It is a large investment for something that isn't a core Ruby feature.

gardenhedge

a year ago

Shopify also owns remix/react router

moomoo11

a year ago

Do people still use rails?

coffeeindex

a year ago

Obviously?

moomoo11

a year ago

Hm okay I was curious because I remember how popular rails got around like 2012-2014.

Since then I feel like most people just opt for go/node instead in my experience. Better performance and easier to deploy and scale.

Alifatisk

a year ago

I would say the hype around Rails has settled since a long time ago, that is maybe why you feel that but now since Rails 8, it is gathering a little bit momentum again.

But you should correlate what the talk of the town is with how much something is being used, it is still heavily used and a good option for startups.

ksec

a year ago

Not sure if DHH gets access to codebase. I hope this help shape future of Ruby Rails. Shopify is many order of magnitude larger than 37Signals and pose many unique challenges. Hopefully this means more stuff gets extracted out into Rails.

matt_s

a year ago

I believe Shopify has core contributors to Ruby and Rails already, I don't think a board position changes much there.

dismalaf

a year ago

Shopify has 1.1k public Github repos... Not sure how you'd integrate that into Rails lol, or why you'd want to. Also the challenges for someone starting a Rails app are different than Shopify.

annjose

a year ago

This discussion was fantastic - great flow, no filler words.

I love the passion and fun they were having while talking about the company, business, marketplace incentives, Ruby on Rails and mechanical keyboards! It was fun watching them have fun.