Top all-time · #4731
Bèr Kessels
Personal blog · berk.esprogrammingwriting
Bèr Kessels writes Bèr ‘berkes’ Kessels, a personal blog at berk.es about programming and writing. Since 2012, 16 different Hacker News readers have linked it 25 times, most often “The Waning of Ruby and Rails”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Essays by Bèr Kessels on Ruby and Rails, blockchain, and fediverse decentralisation. Commenters cite them as support in debates, and one says the private blockchain post explains its topic well.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Waning of Ruby and Rails5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-03-08
- Exponential compound interest on Technical Debt. And how I avoided it2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-08-31
- The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-11-10
- Postmortem of a drupalist leaving Drupal after 12yrs2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-10-01
What Hacker News says?
I'm in the process of creating an MVC framework and was curious about the other architectures you mentioned. This comment seems to be down on MVC and Rails so I was curious about the alternatives you mentioned and came across your post that ended with praise of Rails ( https://berk.es/2022/03/08/the-waning-of-ruby-and-rails/ ): > Rails still is a great way to get a prototype demo, or minimum viable product online in…
Comment linking /2022/03/08/the-waning-of-ruby-and-rails/
on “We lost 54k GitHub stars”Submitted Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software as a story · 476 points
HN discussion>Maybe Ruby is not at the level where is was in 2007-2009 but it is also NOT in a downward trend. It's not only that ruby and ruby on rails are trending down, this has been the case for at least 10 years. https://berk.es/2022/03/08/the-waning-of-ruby-and-rails/ This is only an article, but you will find the same point of view in many other places. The decline of ruby and RoR is obvious for anyone doing web developme…
Comment linking /2022/03/08/the-waning-of-ruby-and-rails/
on “Ruby 3.3”Submitted The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off as a story · 276 points
HN discussionI've been annotating my work several times a day, with `INK`, from "leave some water in the well", a productivity hack from Hemingway[0]. I forgot how I went from "Water in the well" to "ink the well", though. It's been a while since I started doing it, and I wrote a blog-post[1] with some scripts and helpers that I still use. [0] https://www.fastcompany.com/3021905/hemingways-secret-to-mai... [1] https://berk.es/20…
Comment linking /2012/05/30/leave-some-ink-in-the-well/
on “Plotting the source code “TODO” history of the most popular open source projects”Submitted It's not Ruby that's slow, it's your database as a story · 121 points
HN discussionBeing "peer-to-peer distributed" (aka "decentralized") is a fundamental part of the definition of what a blockchain is. This article explains it well: https://berk.es/2018/09/19/the-private-blockchain-fallacy
Comment linking /2018/09/19/the-private-blockchain-fallacy
on “Walmart Requires Lettuce, Spinach Suppliers to Join Blockchain”Submitted The Private Blockchain Fallacy as a story · 110 points
HN discussionI was left confused after reading this article. 1. It claims Rust is ~10x faster than Ruby, based on a benchmark that reads a 23mb file, and then iterates over the data a single time. In my experience, Rust is between 20-100x faster than Ruby in purely CPU-bound workloads. But the author's main contention is that most work is IO-bound instead of CPU-bound, so probably not a big deal. 2. The author claims "it hardly…
Comment linking /images/inline/flamegraph_sequel_read.svg
on “It's not Ruby that's slow, it's your database”Submitted Making a case for JavaScript, in-browser Mining as a story · 45 points
HN discussion> so I often daydream about what I'd build if I were given the chance. In a sense I'm in the same position as you, except that it's probably never going to happen and that I've been thinking about this for years. This was me, until three years ago. I am freelancer, all my gigs, clients and my whole network was about Drupal. Hell, I still receive requests for Drupal work on a weekly basis: my name was established, so…
Comment linking /2012/10/01/farewell-drupal/
on “What's new in Rails 5?”Submitted Bitcoin turning into a multi-layered system is most interesting thing in crypto as a story · 37 points
HN discussionAbout that content: back in the days there were numerous podcasts about Ruby or Rails or both. That was when podcasts were hardly as omnipresent as they are today. There were newsletters, blogs, and every e-learning platform had many prime tutorials on rails. Those aren't all gone . But in the grand scheme of things, Ruby, and Rails' have been relatively decimated. There now are about twice as much (web) devs as bac…
Comment linking /2022/03/08/the-waning-of-ruby-and-rails/
on “Rails Cheat Sheet”Submitted The Waning of Ruby and Rails as a story · 9 points
HN discussion> There are real efficiency issues. For example, when policing offensive material (eg CSAM) is each entity responsible? How is that efficient? Related: https://berk.es/2022/11/08/fediverse-inefficiencies/
Comment linking /2022/11/08/fediverse-inefficiencies/
on “How much decentralisation is too much?”Submitted Blog comments on a static site via social networks as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Postmortem of a drupalist leaving Drupal after 12yrs as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exponential compound interest on Technical Debt. And how I avoided it as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Waning of Ruby and Rails as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Waning of Ruby and Rails as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Event Source Your Spreadsheets for Flexibility and Maintainability as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted “How do I test X” is almost always answered with “by controlling X as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Exponential compound interest on Technical Debt. And how I avoided it as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fifty Shades of Grey as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Drupal Imagecache security vulnarability with DDOS attack explained as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
