Hongli Lai:

A million apps isn’t cool. You know what is cool? A billion apps! Per overwhelming request from language communities Passenger didn’t previously cater to, we introduce generic language support in Passenger 6. Launching in 3, 2, 1…

Passenger began as a Ruby application server, eventually adding support for Node.js, Python, and Meteor apps. Congrats to the relentless team at Phusion for bringing their much-beloved server to even more developer runtimes!

Prominent startup/developer forum Hacker News has shown us how shaken these two groups were. Most GDPR articles received hundreds of upvotes and comments. The reactions had a feeling of mass hysteria.

This motivated me to embark on a mission to bring knowledge and peace of mind to the software developer and startup world. … I initiated a number of AMAs – Ask Me Anything discussions – on a variety of forums. Here are the top questions I received…

Hongli went on to answer questions like “Where do I begin with making sense of GDPR and what to tackle first?”, “What are the most valuable online resources for getting actionable advice?”, “Given that you have no business presence or interest in the EU, what is the worst thing that can happen if you’re not compliant?” …

If software is eating the world, who is writing that software? You are.

Hongli Lai, Co-founder & CTO of Phusion gave a talk at his local Amsterdam.rb meetup and shared his thoughts on the impending deadline of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the impact of socially unaware software that’s eating our world.

…I feel more and more convinced we (as Phusion and as ‘builders of the web’) have a responsibility to provide a framework for thinking about the ethical implication of our creations.

Hongli continues:

We’ve seen companies suffer recently for a lack of that social responsibility (data breaches at Equifax, Facebook, Uber, etc). Public outrage was strong but also burned out quickly as the news cycled. For a while, the same quick fizzle seemed to be happening with the Facebook
and Cambridge Analytica scandal.

It’s up to us to fight back. That doesn’t mean go on twitter and rant, but to actually go an do something. Give a talk in your local area to your developer communities to create with social responsibility in mind.

Hongli Lai, co-founder of Phusion and Passenger engineer, shares his quest for an easy-to-use monitoring solution for Phusion’s servers.

Unlike the other solutions I’ve checked out, Netdata provides real-time, per-second monitoring. You can see the CPU/memory slider update in real time. Netdata also provides alerting and installs a ton of alerts by default. By default Netdata stores collected stats on the same server. This is very convenient if you are just getting started. It can also be configured to send stats to a central server.

Also, go back in time to 2015 when we talked with Hongli on The Changelog #136.

Adam and Jerod talk with Hong Lai, one of the co-founders of Phusion. His company recently got a lot of attention for their upcoming version of Phusion Passenger, which they decided to call Ruby Raptor in a clever marketing play to get people excited about Passenger again. It worked, and we invited Hongli on the show to talk about Passenger/Ruby Raptor, the challenges of marketing open source, and how to get the internet excited about your next version.