Name: Ruby on Rails: The Documentary
Uploaded: 2024-03-04T16:44:26.000Z
Duration: 44 min 16 s
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Back in 1999 or 2000 I had this web design company  called 37signals and I had two partners in the  

business, and we were doing some web design for  people, but I had this side project that I was  

also doing called Single File which was this book,  online book database thing that I was trying to  

build. And I was building it out of PHP, I didn't  know how to program but I picked up a book on PHP  

and I started making this thing. And I got pretty  far, but then I got stumped. So I wrote this post  

online asking for help, it was a general call  for help, "there's my problem -- anyone know how  

to do this?" you know, this is way back before  StackOverflow and all the places you could get  

answers, there were no answers, so help! Someone!  And it turned out this guy wrote me from Denmark.

Back then I was here in Copenhagen,  Denmark working in the web industry,  

and I was just a big fan of the company. Right  from the inception there was a web blog, Signal  

vs. Noise, that I followed religiously right from  the get-go. It was just such a weird company,  

this was a design company that was focused more on  writing than it was on pretty pictures or graphics  

or anything else that I associated with design at  the time. So I was following this company for a  

couple of years and then in 2001, Jason Fried, one  of the original co-founders and still my business  

partner to this day, posted on the blog a question  about programming. I saw this question and I went  

like "Hey, I know the answer to this!". This is a  way for me to give something back to someone I've  

enjoyed reading and learning from in the past two  years. So I did just that, I wrote up an answer  

explaining how to do this thing he wanted to do  in PHP with great detail, the best as I knew it,  

I wasn't an expert programmer really  but I knew the answer to this question.

His answer and his help was so thorough and there  was this quality and this character to his answer  

that made me feel like he really wanted to help  and not just respond, but he really wanted to  

help. And so we started talking back and forth  about this help, and then we got deeper into it,  

and he's like "Can I see the whole thing?" and  I said "Sure!", and I showed him the code and  

he's like "This sucks, we should really start  over, let me do this for you" and so that's how  

my relationship with David actually began: he  telling me my work sucked, and me going "Okay,  

let's do something better then". And it was a  perfect partnership from the beginning there.

I got my first computer when I was 6 years old,  this was in 1985. It was an Amstrad 464 and that  

was my first exposure to programming, typing  video games in from the back of a magazine. I  

wasn't very good at them, I only made a couple  of them work, but this was how I got started.  

Next up was trying to learn programming  once more when I was around 10, 11 or 12,  

a programming environment called Easy AMOS. It  was not easy for me, it may have been Amos but  

it wasn't easy. So I failed once more to learn  programming, I had a hard time with even the  

basics of variables and loops and conditionals  and all the basic constructs you need to learn  

how to program. So I gave it up once more, and  it wasn't until I discovered the internet in  

1995 getting involved with making HTML that  I thought "Hey, here's another opportunity  

for me to be able to create something!". And  in 1999 I started working on a gaming website  

with another programmer in PHP. and that was  really the first time things clicked. At that  

time I'm 20 years old, this is my third attempt  at learning to program but now I understood it.  

And that was really the prep I had before a  year later I would write Jason that email.

So the first time I met Dave was in  Chicago, we were working together,  

we had been working together for quite a  while actually but we never met in person,  

just on Skype you know. So I'm at the John  Hancock building in Chicago, which is a famous  

building in this big plaza waiting for him  to arrive. We agree that we're going to meet  

in the morning and so I'm waiting there and I'm  looking around like is that him?, is that him?,  

is that him?! and then no, it wasn't him, but  then this guy shows up and it comes around the  

corner and he's wearing all white rail thin  like white T-shirt, really short sleeves,  

white capri pants, white shoes. I'm like "there's  Denmark right there, that's David". And I think,  

actually you know, I'm thinking he had white  shoes but I think he may have had rollerblades  

on now that I think about it, I'm not exactly  sure. But it was so obvious that it was him. 

After we'd worked on this book thing for a  while, we worked on another client project,  

then actually a few because we were a web design  firm so we were just doing web design, we did  

a few more things together and then we started  getting really busy and needed a way to manage our  

projects. And so we had this idea to build this  project management tool for ourselves. Now, David  

was still a student at this time, he was still in  Copenhagen at business school there so he didn't  

have a lot of time, he wasn't a full-time employee  or anything yet. And I hired him to do this right  

the back end of Basecamp, and at the time he's  like "I don't want money, I want laptops, I want  

computer equipment" because it was very hard for  him to get modern Apple stuff in Denmark. So every  

time he came to the US - this is probably illegal,  but anyway - every time he came to the US I gave  

him a laptop or I gave him a, you know, whatever  he needed at the time right. And that was payment  

for Basecamp, and he would only give us like 10  hours a week cause that's all the time he had.

2003 is when we decided to start on Basecamp. We  had worked together in these consulting projects  

and most of the organization around that had  been over email, an experience everyone feels  

I think if they try to organize projects over  email. So we thought, do you know what? we know  

how to make web applications, can't we just  make an application that'll make this easier  

for us to do so we don't have to deal with  all these email threads and which version  

of the file is the latest and what's left to do  before we can launch?. And that's what we did,  

and I had just earlier that year discovered  Ruby through the writings of Martin Fowler  

and Dave Thomas who were using Ruby to illustrate  programming concepts that they were writing about  

in programming magazines. I just thought, this is  a really interesting programming language. First  

of all I hadn't heard about it before, and I'd  been working with the web for quite some years  

at that point, that was intriguing. It was out  of Japan, that was intriguing. I saw the code  

and it looked just like pseudo code, you know how  if you're trying to explain a programming concept  

sometimes you won't write the exact right syntax,  you'll just write something that more looks like  

English. And that's exactly what Ruby looked like.  And I thought, this is just really interesting.  

And here are these two titans of the industry,  Dave Thomas and Martin Fowler, who were clearly  

very enamored with the language, expressing that  they would wish to write systems in this language  

if they could only get permission to do so. And  I thought, you know what? Here's a project where  

we can choose to do whatever we want, so I got to  make the choice and the choice was let's try Ruby.

I remember in the early days of building Basecamp,  you know, I didn't have any input on the backend,  

but David's like "you know, I'm going to use  this thing called Ruby to build Basecamp",  

cause we've been been working in PHP previously  and I'm like, "What the f()c% is Ruby?!?" I've  

never heard of this. He's like, "It's  this thing out of Japan". I'm like,  

all right, I mean really I truly I didn't  care because it's his part of the project,  

it's not my job to tell him  what to use, and I trusted him.

When we started working on Basecamp in 2003, I  was getting proficient enough in programming to  

start to develop a taste for what I liked in  programming, but I hadn't found yet somewhere  

to express that taste. It really wasn't until  I discovered Ruby that I found the programming  

language that simply clicked for me. And what  I loved about Ruby was this sense of combining  

the immediacy of PHP being able to get Hello  World onto the web with a minimal amount of  

fuzz together with a really sophisticated well  thought out coherent object-oriented program  

language. That was the appeal I found in Java  that there was all this intellectual rigor the  

software pattern and all the other stuff that  serious system development engineers were all  

about. And Ruby to me brought both of those  things together, or at least could bring both  

of those two things together. And that's where I  saw an opportunity. It started out really simple,  

I had a two week window that I gave myself  of could I build just the basics of a web  

application, could I get HTML up in the screen  that was rendered from Ruby, and I was talking  

to a database and could I simply make those things  happen. So there wasn't a lot of libraries, there  

were not a lot of frameworks, there were certainly  not a lot of things to help you with database  

access or with the web development in general.  And that's how Rails came about, that I simply had  

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Ruby on Rails: The Documentary

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