The rough math goes like this: We spent $3.2m on cloud in 2022. Just under a million of that was on storing 8 petabytes of files in S3, fully replicated across several regions. So that leaves ~$2.3m on everything else: app servers, cache servers, database servers, search servers, the works. That’s the part of the budget we intend to bring to zero in 2023. Then we’ll worry about exiting the 8PB from S3 in 2024.

David spoke at length on this decision when he was on Ship It! late last year.

15 years ago, Gerhard discovered magic in the form of Ruby on Rails. It was intuitive and it just worked. That is the context in which Gerhard fell in love with infrastructure and operations.

Today, for special episode 77, we start at Seven Shipping Principles, and, in the true spirit of Ship It, we’ll see what happens next.

Our guest is David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails, co-founder of Basecamp & HEY, and a lot more - check out dhh.dk.

TLDR: AWS is super-expensive at scale.

Of course it’s expensive to rent your computers from someone else. But it’s never presented in those terms. The cloud is sold as computing on demand, which sounds futuristic and cool, and very much not like something as mundane as “renting computers”, even though that’s mostly what it is.

But also:

It’s also about what kind of internet we want to operate in the future. It strikes me as downright tragic that this decentralized wonder of the world is now largely operating on computers owned by a handful of mega corporations. If one of the primary AWS regions go down, seemingly half the internet is offline along with it.

Methinks this will become even more of a trend in the coming months and years.

DHH announcing the 7th major release of Ruby on Rails:

This version of Rails has been years in the conceptual making. It’s the fulfillment of a vision to present a truly full-stack approach to web development that tackles both the front- and back-end challenges with equal vigor. An omakase menu that includes everything from the aperitif to the dessert.

There’s a lot to like about the new Node-free approach to the frontend, at-work encryption added to Active Record, a new auto-loading strategy, and more. Congrats to the hundreds of contributors who worked on this major milestone!

DHH posted a gist sharing HEY’s Ruby dependencies for the curious. It’s a pretty stock Rails app with MySQL (?!) and Redis stores, Elasticsearch, and a few other niceties. One line that caught my eye was:

gem 'turbo', github: 'basecamp/turbo'

That points to a private repo, so there will probably be some new open source turbolinks stuff here real soon. Anything else in this Gemfile catch your interest?

DHH shared his thoughts on The Great Divide. After all, the web IS just…HTML, CSS, and JavaScript…

…as The Great Divide points out, regression is lurking, because the industry is making it too hard to work directly with the web. The towering demands inherent in certain ways of working with JavaScript are rightfully scaring some designers off from implementing their ideas at all. That’s a travesty.

At Basecamp, web designers all do HTML, CSS, and frequently the first-pass implementations of the necessary JavaScript and Rails code as well! It means they get to iterate on their design ideas with full independence. In the real app!

DHH announced on the Ruby on Rails blog the details behind Action Mailbox, the second brand new framework coming to Rails 6 (the first was Action Text). Action Mailbox routes incoming emails to controller-like mailboxes for processing in Rails.

The framework was, like Action Text and Active Storage, extracted from Basecamp 3. We’ve been using a related approach to route everything from forwarded emails to email replies to messages and discussions. After extracting the ideas into Action Mailbox, we reintegrated the framework into Basecamp, and we’ve been running the code we’re sharing today for over a month in production.

DHH announces Action Text, a big new feature coming to Rails 6:

It’s an integration between the Trix editor, Active Storage-backed file and image processing, and a text-processing flow that ties it all together. With Action Text, you really shouldn’t ever have to impoverish your users with a vanilla textarea ever again!

I’m a bit torn on this. On one hand, Trix is a good tool and many (most?) web apps need rich text editing at some point in their lifespan. On the other hand, it’s difficult to build general purpose features like this that span both the front and back ends of the stack.

Rails 6 is a ways away (with betas starting in early 2019), so we’ll have to wait and see. Regardless of whether this particular feature pans out, it’s great to see the Rails team continue to innovate and try new things.

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) shares the story of how JavaScript sprinkles in Basecamp evolved into a full-fledged framework called Stimulus. We talked about ins and outs of Basecamp as it is today, Ruby, JavaScript, David’s somewhat new found love for JavaScript, how they open source because they can, and David’s new YouTube series called “On Writing Software Well”.

Follow along with DHH as he explores the Basecamp 3 codebase to uncover areas of the code that can be improved one way or another. This is as close as it gets to pair programming with David as he examines the code and ways he might improve it.

When you combine the gains of Turbolinks and Stimulus…

Turbolinks maintains a persistent process, just like single-page applications do. It intercepts links and loads new pages via Ajax. The server still returns fully-formed HTML documents. This strategy alone can make most actions in most applications feel really fast. For Basecamp, it sped up the page-to-page transition by ~3x.

But Turbolinks alone is only half the story. Prior to Stimulus, Basecamp used different styles and patterns to apply “JavaScript sprinkles”.

Stimulus rolls up the best of those patterns into a modest, small framework revolving around just three main concepts: Controllers, actions, and targets. It’s designed to read as a progressive enhancement when you look at the HTML it’s addressing…

You should 💯 read the rest of this post as well as watch this proposition of Turbolinks from Sam Stephenson at RailsConf 2016. ALSO, we’re recording a show next week with David Heinemeier Hansson about Stimulus, so send us any questions you have by replying to this email, Slack, or Twitter.

DHH’s latest is sure to be controversial:

A modest JavaScript framework for the HTML you already have

Modest in scope, perhaps, but not in prescription.

It doesn’t seek to take over your entire front-end—in fact, it’s not concerned with rendering HTML at all. Instead, it’s designed to augment your HTML with just enough behavior to make it shine.

The “JavaScript Sprinkles” style has always appealed to me more than using full-in frameworks. We might have to give this a try…

David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH joined the show to talk through the past, present, and future of Ruby on Rails — the most beloved web application framework in the Ruby community.