Embrace being a crud monkey

From @dhh's talk today

THIS IMAGE, THOUGH!

Ruby on Rails was always miles ahead of other tools been using it since 2010 and not a single time I wanted to use anything else

When's the crud monkey hat dropping?

DHH needs a voice coach, it’s a beautiful message disguised in unnecessary shouting.

People who haven't been in the industry for more than 10 years will never know how true this is.

A single dev in 1999 does not even have a proper backup !!! I was once working in a startup with that FTP thing, one of our college accidentally drag and dropped a folder into somewhere and everything just gone !!!!!!!!!! Thank god, we found the folder into somewhere some other folder at the end after long search. Imagine the whole codebase just gone because you just dragged something !!!! That startup raised seed funds and has huge worth data.

This is sooo valid at this point with Vercel vs CF debacle and you know what they are both Merchants of Complexity - Bundling so much in their plans that any one onboarding feels like they are missing something if they haven’t integrated things complex things in their core stack.

Cloudflare is free though?

Almost free for most the cases. Pro plan worth $5 has wayyy higher limits as compared to the free plans. And there are n+1 things in that plan.

Yes but I run everything on free it works fine?

Yeah it should. Basic stuff like CDN, firewall seems free with ample limit. I hosted my serverless APIs and free tier has limits on CPU time per request etc.

We had put a code editor built into our backend. Just click Save and it was live. Early PHP days were great.

Compnies are now adult daycares with corrupt incentives to grow staff and especially in the dev community where immigrant nepotism results in ineffective and bloated teams and job creation for spouses in the QA department.

I used to be a crud monkey, now I add to the complexity with Roadmaps, Epics, Stories, Story Points, T Shirt sizing, Scrum, Scrum ban, swim lanes, Jira, Confluence as a Product Manager. Right screw this shit, going back to my headphones and Cursor

Everyone selling shovels but nobody is digging. Just dig. Do it with PHP, or whatever you got dig.

I would listen to DHH if his product that I’m paying him $99/year for wasn’t turning into complete dogshit with every passing months @dhh add me to the repo for 24 hours, let me push a fucking regex blocklist editor, I’m begging you

🫡 building b2b crud on a 5$/mo hetzner vps with 97% profit margin

This is just gross oversimplification. It's like saying a computer is just a "data storer & transformer". What a computer does it stores data to a disk (locally or on a remote machine via network), then what is the need for an Operating System. The abstractions were built out of necessity.

Maybe the quality of devs has gone down or the quantity of bad Devs has increased Probably a lot harder to become a qualified Dev shipping in 99 I have worked with a lot of people who would have caused major outages if they could just solo deploy in seconds

simple is better than complex

AI with all the PRDs, MCPs, Background Agents and N8N Flows has basically invented it's own spin on the same problem

lot of companies butchered their well performing web app with a crazy load of micro services that they deployed across data centers for load balancing, then deploying redis clusters to handle shared caching and state, and then again using kubernetes to orchestrate the microservices, and then and then..

New job title unlocked: Senior Crud Monkey.

My favorite flavor is still vanilla.

I’ve met my share of Merchants of Complexity. They find my work to be “rudimentary” when I don’t include buttons and features they’ll never use.

I was too distracted by that glorious hair.

I can remember managing all my sites in dreamweaver syncing code from local to remote. Spending all night coding to get a deadline done for a demo the next morning. And deleting the wrong directory... Finding out on site just before the demo. So appy we hae Github Actions now. Yes it takes a bit longer, but it runs all my tests, and im pretty confident I never break production again. Or worse: delete production code....

i started with vercel + nextjs + neondatabase. Slowly Slowly moving into hetzner + coolify + cloudflare. You can basically host anything on hetzner provided you use right caching (CF CDN, Hyperdrive, etc.)

But we need: - observability - log shipping - encryption at rest and in transit and in everything - security scanning - dr and resiliency, multiple redundant systems - circuit breakers and more architecture - agile sprints

Totally agree. i am still on Filezilla + Sublime as main tools.

you would be a great rails developer

I’ve literally worked on projects with millions in budget that could have been deployed in raspberry pie level hardware. The over engineering in the industry is monstrous.

I think modern UI is largely responsible for the growth of the merchants of complexity.

It’s true. Deployments and development is slower than in the past. It’s teams to projects that a single guy can do.

@jeanfsorio reject modernity, embrace php

Embrace the monkey again

My day is basically watching all the podcasts/interviews of @dhh and getting pumped with his fucking energy. A true legend! Wise words and beautifully said.