Can you cite this in some way? Given he's shown the competence to write and typeset an impressive series of books, I find this claim pretty hard to believe.
Here is his fvwm rc. Given that it's fully documented, I will walk back my assumption that he can barely open a terminal. I researched it a bit and recalled an interview where he said something like "all I use X windows for is is to open a terminal in FVWM", so he clearly can customize it, but he prefers a minimalist setup.
The plan with Rails World is that it'll alternate between continents. Rails World 2023 was in Amsterdam, 2024 was in Toronto, and 2025 will be back in Amsterdam.
Japan has RubyKaigi and some other great conferences already. Europe still has a few, but nowhere near as many as the old days. Lots of great European developers who are still into Rails though, so the alternation feels like a good compromise.
* Thinking they held all the cards, RailsConf uninvited DHH from the conference in 2022. They would never admit this, but the reasons were extremely petty, and all due to Ruby Central's (organizer of RailsConf and RubyConf) hyperpartisan nature. For example, DHH dared to suggest the audacious policy of "no politics at work" during a year where extreme politicization ran rampant. This may sound like an exaggeration, and I wish it were, but it's not.
* In 2023, the first Rails World was held in Amsterdam, organized by a new entity called the Rails Foundation (created by DHH and a number of other pioneers). It was a vastly better conference. By this time, RailsConf had all but eliminated their technical track in favor of "soft" subject matter. Amenities like coffee were only available during a tight ~30 minute window in the morning. The food was awful. And this despite tickets not being cheap. At Rails World by contrast, the talks were world class, the company/community excellent, and the snacks/food/amenities plentiful and top tier.
* Rails World was a smash success while RailsConf 2023 was unambiguously, not. One sold out in <10 minutes, the other was sparsely attended at best. Sponsors started moving.
* The same pattern repeated in 2024, except worse. While Rails World 2023 has been a pilot even with relatively few attendees, far more tickets were allowed for 2024, and even with the additional capacity, it still sold out in minutes. Not only was DHH keynoting, but all talks and the event itself were of the highest possible quality bar.
Meanwhile, Ruby Central was making some very poor financial decisions. For example, they reportedly gave up a ~half million dollar deposit on a Texas venue for 2023 so they could move the conference to San Diego. Once again, for political reasons (in their world view, Texas = evil, despite some the organizers themselves choosing to live there).
With the trend lines moving in all the wrong directions, there was no way that RailsConf was going to survive much longer anyway, so they decided to call it quits for 2025.
Obviously, RubyCentral had made their 2022 decision to uninvite DHH banking on him not deciding to start his own conference, but he did, and it turned out that he held all the cards, not them. There was a lot of unnecessary strife involved in the whole process, but in the end, the Rails community has landed in a much better place.
I just deleted a few hundred words reply trying to add some additional context to it. But I guess in the spirit of not adding any more drama to Ruby and Rails may be the answer above is good enough.
But if there is one thing I want to add is how good the Rails Foundation is being run. Amanda Perino is insanely great. Money is actually being spent on Marketing and Tutorial as well as documentation. More value output per dollar, which in turns means more sponsor willing to invest.
> Amanda Perino is insanely great. Money is actually being spent on Marketing and Tutorial as well as documentation. More value output per dollar, which in turns means more sponsor willing to invest.
Agreed, they're doing great. Just an example of great operational aptitude in even the fine details that most people wouldn't even notice:
At Rails World, sponsor booths were mixed right in with the lunch area, and lunch was meant to be eaten on the go, so as to prevent siloing at sit down tables. The net effect was a ton of foot traffic through the expo floor, making sponsors really feel like they got good value for their money. (This was also good for attendees, because it means you meet a lot more people.)
Contrast to RailsConf again, where the sponsorship area was off in a distant corner of the venue, or at best in a transitionary area that people would walk through for 15 seconds on their way to lunch. People in the booths could go entire days talking to just a handful of people, making the value proposition extremely dubious.
This is a small detail that most conference organizers wouldn't even think of, but Rails World nailed it 2/2 years so far.
I don't know as much about the docs/tutorials/marketing investments, but I have confidence that the money is being spent well.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40835261 shows a moderator of /r/rails rewriting history, implying Dave not going to RailsConf 2022 was Dave's fault, along with airing bizarre grievances like "We inserted snark at DHH in a Rails release candidate."
> shows a moderator of /r/rails rewriting history, implying Dave not going to RailsConf 2022 was his fault, along with airing bizarre grievances like "We inserted snark at DHH in a Rails release candidate."
Yeah, I've unfortunately been watching this in real time over the years, and the bad faith from these guys is just on another level. First, they were fairly overt about what they'd done because they were proud of it. Later, they mischaracterized it through rewriting history. And these days, they just don't talk about it at all (notably, there isn't a word about it in the article linked above).
Here's another example: the original Reddit thread from 2022 talking about DHH being uninvited, where the same person abused his moderator powers by actually just outright banning anyone who dared to talk about why it actually happened:
There were a lot more interesting conversation on twitter at the time.
Interesting I am seeing a lot of these unfolding then and now. And in hindsight Rails is now much better because Rails Foundation. Now if we can do the same for Ruby itself.
Whoa, I knew about them uninviting DHH (a move I disagreed with), but I didn't know about all these events that followed.
If I was deciding to attend a conference, I would 100% prefer to attend one where DHH and other pioneers are organizing/speaking. And also one that had more meat rather than the "softer" topics as you suggested.
And I 100% agreed with their "No politics at work" stance.
I had a policy in our company against discussing politics. I used to say some variation of "We provide products & services to our clients, and they pay us money to do so. Our politics or our clients' politics don't matter." (And it was easy to make this statement because there was no chance of our product being used by authoritarians or something, we were building software for COVID response).
So we had a hard rule that there would be no political discussions on company "property" (company slack, company emails, etc), exactly what 37signals had. If you want to text each other personally, go right ahead.
Nobody seemed to have an issue with it.
So in a nutshell, sounds like the personal political views (and attitude of partisanship) of the organizers ruined the conference.
It's hard to tell given the private stock and all, but the article mentions that there's reason to believe the company hasn't taken quite as much of a haircut as comparable ones that are already on the public markets:
> In March, Fidelity, required to publicly update the value of its holdings, marked down Stripe by 20%. Most unicorns—startups valued at $1 billion or more—are trading on the secondary markets at 20% to 40% discounts to their last official venture capital rounds. But Stripe’s shares remain hard for new investors to obtain and in high demand, with recent transactions implying a valuation of as much as $165 billion, per New York–based EquityZen, a marketplace for pre-IPO shares.
Does buying private stock on EquityZen include any due diligence? I'm skeptical that it's helping with price discovery, but I don't really understand the platform.
The topic reminded me of a good episode of Invest Like the Best with Carta CEO Henry Ward[1], which included a discussion of their CartaX platform for offering insiders a chance to sell private stock to institutions.
> each person known by us to be the beneficial owner of more than 5% of the outstanding shares of our Class A or Class B common stock; and
It seems that Dmitriy owns less than 5%.
As usual though, the wording in here is unnecessarily opaque and overcomplicated — it's possible there's some other technicality that allows him to be omitted from the list.
Just to play devil's advocate — OOC, what do you think the end game for Álvaro would be under this scenario?
Under the most cynical interpretation, I guess he'd convert Ongres from a Postgres consultancy to a trademark troll and sue other companies who try to use "Postgres"? Maybe, but that's a pretty serious professional change, and seems a little unlikely, especially given that's a considerable chance that he loses the trademark again if it does end up in court.
For my money, the most likely explanation is that it was a land grab move for prestige purposes that went too far. (And one which may backfire as Google ties this press release to his name.)
I get the impression that Álvaro has issues with the governance of the core team and PGCAC and thus wanted trademarks to protect his consultancy that were under the control of his non-profit which he believes has stricter governance. He also seems to be interested in leveraging the trademarks to force governance changes on the core team and PGCAC.
Yeah. My comments are from before Alvaro started commenting in this thread, and I've since changed my position based on reading his responses.
> He also seems to be interested in leveraging the trademarks to force governance changes on the core team and PGCAC.
This is it. The strategy was to acquire the trademarks and then use them as leverage to force the dissolution of Postgres Core and its associated organizations, to be replaced with a new power structure which includes him as a key member.
The very last part is me editorializing somewhat (although it's not very much of a stretch), but he's been quite explicit about the rest of it.
Trademark trolling is specifically the use case for this. Sue every sub $300k/yr company than mentions that they use PostgreSQL in their stack. They won't have the funds to defend themselves, he makes off with $10k-$30k in settlements and goes on to the next one until a court stops him.
It's worth noting that (from the article) the offender in this case isn't some gigantic organization like Amazon — it's basically one guy, and one who considers himself to be a member in good standing whose part of the Postgres community.
I'd hazard a guess that by taking this public, the Postgres team is trying to create some pressure on him through public opinion in the hope that he sees reason and it doesn't have to become a long and arduous legal battle which benefits no one.
And it really shouldn't have to. It's not clear what Álvaro's actual motives are in trying to usurp the Postgres trademark — it could be some cynical profiteering thing, but hopefully it was just some momentary hubris that can still be walked back and resolved amicably.
I mean, assume good faith, strongest possible reading, etc etc: Isn't it perfectly possible that he's actually just doing exactly what he says he's doing?
The "PostgreSQL Community" is supposed to be decentralised, with no intellectual property held by any single entity to target in a hostile takeover, so he's just doing his bit to help decentralise holding of trademarks.
Seems a perfectly plausible reading of events; far from "cynical profiteering", nor even "momentary hubris".
Exactly this. The city's budget was $6.4B in 2010, and $12.6B for 2021-2022, which is down from $13.7B for 2020-2021 (only because of Corona). That's a _doubling_ in a decade, and speaking somewhat subjectively as someone who's been here the entire time, all public services and the state of the streets have continued getting worse. Even if you don't buy that, it's absolutely certain that nothing has gotten better.
It's not clear how SF can escape the situation, but there are a few things that are absolutely certain, and one of them is that more money is not going to fix the problem. We need a different approach.
Pretty much this. Regardless of how you feel about Uber/Lyft drivers' ability to access benefits, if the bill that does it has this many exemptions, you should oppose it on that basis alone.
The long exemption list is a naked method of making sure that AB5 only targets its intended victims — Uber and Lyft, without actually having to mention them by name. If this law is generally a good idea, then why should it have required any exemptions at all?
The ethical version of AB5 would have been to have California (and the broader US) move have a single payer healthcare system, paid for by taxes, as it already is for a huge portion (but not all) of the population. That way, everyone gets access to health care, and everyone pays for it.
But that's hard to do, so California's cynical lawmakers "solve" the problem by passing the buck in a much simpler way: pass regulation to target their scapegoats du jour (as an assemblyperson, I get _my_ healthcare from the state, but it's _those guys_ who are bad! yeah!) with laser precision through special carveouts. Thus AB5 is born.
> Was the COO fired? It sounds like she was, reading this article.
Knowing nothing about the internals at Dropbox, it does sound like it (on the surface at least). Having worked at a couple major tech companies now, executives never get fired. They "step down", or go on sabbatical ... and never come back. The usual hallmark of the action is that the email about it isn't sent by the leaving executive themselves, it's sent by their boss.
Normal employees don't tend to have these options, but executives are so high profile that it seems to be an informalized practice for both company and executive to save face. It's hard to worry about them too much though because their exit package is likely more than than most of us could make given ten years.
Also, the terms of whatever seperation gets figured out often includes keeping the exec as an employee (in a legal sense). They might not actually be doing any meaninful work, but but they still get the paychecks, extended time to exercise options/stock, health benefits, etc ...
