Top all-time · #1953
David Heinemeier Hansson
Personal blog · dhh.dkprogrammingcareer
David Heinemeier Hansson's personal blog at dhh.dk covers programming and career. Since 2018, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 40 times, most often “Rails Is Omakase (DHH)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (29) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link DHH's blog for essays on Rails design, such as 'Rails is Omakase', and on testing, such as 'Test-Induced Design Damage'. Many comments cite these as reference points.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Praised as a 'great article' (Rails is Omakase), a 'very good' TDD essay, and 'very interesting' on maintainer entitlement; 'lots of insights'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 29 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Creator of Ruby on Rails, creator of Omarchy, co-owner of 37signals, best-selling author, Le Mans class-winning racing driver, investor in Danish startups, Shopify board member, frequent podcast guest, and family man.
Most-linked posts?
- Rails Is Omakase (DHH)12 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2019-05-29
- Test-Induced Design Damage8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-08-23
- TDD is dead. Long live testing. (2014)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-04-08
- Test-induced design damage (2014)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-12-16
What Hacker News says?
Read everything DHH wrote, he has lots of insights on this. Scroll down to his books: https://dhh.dk I found Lean Startup to be very good too.
Comment linking /
on “The best programmers I know”Submitted About the Apple Card as a story · 234 points
HN discussionI built my last company with Go, Vue.js, gRPC, and Kubernetes. And, wow was it a slog. It was hard for new developers to jump in, we had separate engineers for frontend + backend, and there were things we never even touched - such as real-time/websockets or end-to-end testing. I recently started a new project in the same stack [1], and partway through paused because it was taking so long to deliver customer value. I…
Comment linking /2012/rails-is-omakase.html
on “Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs”Submitted We need counter capital - DHH as a story · 32 points
HN discussionthis remind of a great article written by DHH https://dhh.dk/2012/rails-is-omakase.html > Rails is omakase. A team of chefs picked out the ingredients, designed the APIs, and arranged the order of consumption on your behalf according to their idea of what would make for a tasty full-stack framework.
Comment linking /2012/rails-is-omakase.html
on “Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs”Submitted Test-induced design damage (2014) as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThe tension I observe is: when should you use a highly productive and well-known framework like Django or Rails, and when should you build your own DDD/Clean architecture? This discussion has gone on for a long time, e.g. see the back-and-forth around https://dhh.dk/2014/test-induced-design-damage.html after Weirich demonstrated what sort of thing is required to use the Hexagonal Architecture with Rails. I believe t…
Comment linking /2014/test-induced-design-damage.html
on “A Theory of Software Architecture”Submitted TDD is dead. Long live testing. (2014) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI'm reminded of DHH's article, "Rails is Omakase" [0] back during the time when "convention over configuration" [1] was a common refrain, meant to avoid the proliferation of (YAML or XML) configuration files by assuming sensible defaults and pre-selecting various parts of the solution stack or architecture, instead of letting it be freely specified by the developer. You lose a few degrees of freedom and flexibility…
Comment linking /2012/rails-is-omakase.html
on “Why are we templating YAML? (2019)”Submitted Rails Is Omakase (DHH) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionRails, from what I remember, has a strong my-way-or-the-highway attitude. It has many strengths, but deviating from the happy path isn't it's strength. It's creator claimed it was Omakase. [1] [1] https://dhh.dk/2012/rails-is-omakase.html
Comment linking /2012/rails-is-omakase.html
on “VMware Acquires Carbon Black for $2.1B and Pivotal for $2.7B”Submitted Test-Induced Design Damage as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> You can't refactor code without tests See this is where the conversation goes south. You will use the phrase "unit tests" when it suits you, and then, like a magician using indirection, generalize to the word "tests" when it suits you. Why are you listening to Uncle Bob so much? I mean you can do as you like. However, the strong "Uncle Bob" style assertions should probably be left out of most articles in favor of…
Comment linking /2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.html
on “When to Use TypeScript – A Detailed Guide Through Common Scenarios”Submitted TDD is dead, long live testing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt is so long ago now that I can't even find stuff about it on Google -- 2006 I think? Basically, well after they'd released the framework they had to change the Rails scaffolding (and I think their own apps) because parts of the scaffolding (CRUD deletes) would use GET to do the action that should only be done as POST. They discovered it about the time link-prefetching was invented ;-) Basically, browsers were pre-…
Comment linking /arc/000455.html
on “Laravel 9”Submitted DHH on Test-induced design damage (2014) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://dhh.dk/2014/test-induced-design-damage.html
Comment linking /2014/test-induced-design-damage.html
on “Mastering Programming (2016)”Submitted Test-induced design damage (2014) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionA horrible Rails-speak affectation. But it is well documented! https://dhh.dk/2012/rails-is-omakase.html
Comment linking /2012/rails-is-omakase.html
on “Russ Cox’s response to “Go Is Not a Community Driven Project””Submitted The merits of strong typing (2002) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> If you find your testers splitting up functions to support the testing process, you’re destroying your system Why Most Unit Testing is Waste 4 architecture and code comprehension along with it. Test at a coarser level of granularity. This is very much in line with DHH's opinion about testing in general (the discussion "TDD is dead" is about this). He said that he doesn't want to split logic for the sake of testing…
Comment linking /2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.html
on “Most Unit Testing Is Waste (2014) [pdf]”Submitted The Parley Letter (2012) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionIt's no surprise given the distro name, and DHH's previous use of the word Omakase [1, or, perhaps, 2] [1]: https://dhh.dk/2012/rails-is-omakase.html [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E99FnoYqoII
Comment linking /2012/rails-is-omakase.html
on “Omarchy, a Linux Distribution by DHH”My experience is that the resulting architecture will sometimes end up with characteristics that makes it easy to test but more complex, exposes things it should not and too many layers of indirection. DHH wrote some about it here: https://dhh.dk/2014/test-induced-design-damage.html I do like automated tests (unit and integration) and often TDD is appropriate. However tests are not the end goal of an architecture. T…
Comment linking /2014/test-induced-design-damage.html
on “Test-driven development: A great idea hiding behind a terrible implementation?”> Did you make that up? I stole the analogy from this article talking about Rails and applied it to Apple. https://dhh.dk/2012/rails-is-omakase.html
Comment linking /2012/rails-is-omakase.html
on “Macs with T2, M1 chips cannot be restored to factory state without Apple”Link prefetching is generally something you would want a website to retain control over, because it can distort stats, cause resource starvation, and even (when web developers are idiots) cause things like deletions (when a clickable link has a destructive outcome). I am reminded of the infamous time when DHH had to have it explained to him that GET requests shouldn’t have side effects, after the Rails scaffolding g…
Comment linking /arc/000454.html
on “The Chrome Speculation Rules API allows the browser to preload and prerender”It's been hard to find a timeline or more general history of TDD and I should have probably used the word "had" above. But my understanding is RSpec[0] was a huge driver of the test driven development hype cycle. While DHH[1] has, as of 2014, come out against TDD and was probably never 100% on-board he is not the whole community and that's still a gap of 9 years where, in my understanding, it was broadly popularised…
Comment linking /2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing
on “You Want Modules, Not Microservices”This is long overdue. Rails got very nice updates in the past years to make it easier to handle JS and other assets. Deploying it was still always a hassle and involved searching for existing Dockerfiles and blog posts to cobble together a working one. At the beginning I always thought I'm doing something wrong as it's supposed to be easy and do everything nicely out of the box. And dhh apparently agrees (Now at lea…
Comment linking /posts/30-myth-1-rails-is-hard-to-deploy
on “Rails on Docker”There was a back-and-forth between DHH and some of the original TDD advocates a while ago, which I thought was pretty interesting. Test-Induced Design Damage: https://dhh.dk//2014/test-induced-design-damage.html And a resulting conversation between Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, and David Heinemeier Hansson: https://martinfowler.com/articles/is-tdd-dead/ I think a lot can be learned from the exchange.
Comment linking //2014/test-induced-design-damage.html
on “Why Developers don’t TDD: a podcast series”This is a very good article on the same topic by DHH. A great read if you haven't read it before: > Test-first fundamentalism is like abstinence-only sex ed: An unrealistic, ineffective morality campaign for self-loathing and shaming. https://dhh.dk//2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.html
Comment linking //2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.html
on “Why Developers don’t TDD: a podcast series”
