Kodsnack 716 - Dubious lifestyle decisions, with James Smith
2026-08-18 05:26
Fredrik chats with James Smith about forking Rails for the greater good. The name of the project is Mosscap. (During recording, it still used the temporary name Amiko.) James explains why the forking project has been started, and why many people have been calling for change within the Rails world for a long time.
James talks about what has been done so far, the importance of getting more people involved, quickly, technical solutions, and of getting the governance model right. Technology and development in itself isn’t really the important focus. Mosscap is place to keep maintaining existing Rails apps, but not necessarily the way to start completely new ones. There may not even be a second major version of Mosscap. There are other projects for that situation.
We also discuss James' project Manyfold and how it works to apply for and build software funded by NLNet (EU, essentially) grants.
Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!
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Links
- James
- Manyfold - James own project
- NGI zero
- Ruby on rails
- Mosscap - the permanent name
- Rails needs new governance - blog post with plenty of background on why change is needed
- Rails is done - blog post about Mosscap, background, and supporting something stable
- Open letter to the Rails core team last year
- DHH - David Heinemeier Hansson - you can find his blog posts if you really want to
- Rubygems - the package manager and system
- ARPANET
- Join the Matrix space
- Gem aliasing
- Monkey patching
- Follow Mosscap project on Mastodon
- Repos for the fork - known as Amiko at the time of recording, now Mosscap
- Support us on Ko-fi!
- Amiko - friend in Esperanto
- Electromagnetic field festival
- CVE
- Fediverse
- Hanakai - another base on which to build Ruby apps
- Hanami - app framework which is part of Hanakai
- LTS - long-term support
- Mosscap’s governance documents
- Fedipub
- nlnet.nl
Titles
- Tech for good
- All of our collective intelligence together
- Some dubious lifestyle decisions
- Trying really hard to not know why
- Not taking anything away from anyone
- Me with a fork
- Reasons why things won’t work
- I thought it was Japanese
- Stomping around, being angry in a field
- You’re somebody
- Somebody should do something
- A proper security process
- Many weird technical decisions because of philosophical stances
- No funding for maintenance
- We’ll be looking after the core
- Detailed for the likes of me
- Here’s a donation
- Donation unlocked
- Grantdown
- A slightly less tech bro-y future