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holman
ama
OPEN SOURCE2011–2021
holman / ama

ama

Ask @holman anything!

22Distinct people
27Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
722GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Ask @holman anything!

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I really like Zach Holman's comment on this one. --- [0]: https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/698#issuecomment-118547... I can't remember who said it initially, but my…

octref used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year27 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2011-12-23 20:46:49 UTC to 2021-06-02 09:39:58 UTC.

0123452011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20112012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 4 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 1 submissions, 4 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 3 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC440
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC514
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC330
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
holman/ama A repository to ask @holman anything. I worked at GitHub for five years and have written and spoken a lot about building company culture, improving your development workflow, and really important shit like emoji. If you have a question you're interested in reading me tap out a response for, this is just the joint for you. Ask a question Asking a question is as easy as creating a new issue on this project. I'll try to answer it as soon as I can get to it. Once I answer I'll close the issue just so I know what I've covered, but don't worry- if you have any further questions just respond in the thread and I'll get back to you soon. Feel free to ask a question on any old issue too, even if you didn't create it. Read some questions Check out the Closed Issues filter on this repository to browse questions I've answered in the past. I try to use this as an email replacement that everyone can see, so feel free to dig into some of the older threads. Twitter If you have something quick and easy, just ping me on Twitter. 280 characters makes everyone more efficient. I'm @holman on Twitter. Forking If you'd like to create your own AMA repository: Click Fork at the top of this page Edit the README (make sure to change the name and links and all that) Enable issues on your repository (they're in your fork's Settings page).
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

2 sources
octref·May 16, 2016Recommendation phrase
I really like Zach Holman's comment on this one. --- [0]: https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/698#issuecomment-118547... I can't remember who said it initially, but my favorite sentiment on all this is: > The only people still using Ruby are the ones making money. In other words, I think it's a pretty great, stable community of people who use it in production and have seen it all, so to speak. I kind of include Python in this, too- besides the obvious syntactical similarities, I think they are pretty similar in terms of ideology. I'm in a bit of my third honeymoon with Ruby (and Rails) this summer. I've been seeing a lot of people in the Go community, for example, talk about "just use the http libraries, no one needs a framework" and I think they're fucking bonkers, or at the very least write backend apps with no UI and no more than two
Read the rest
contributors on the project. Frameworks like Rails give you so many security, development, and deployment niceties that I have zero interest in rolling my own anymore. (I saw a "screw frameworks" Go talk that spent ten minutes on how to reload code in development, for example... that was a solved problem for me in 2005.) I'm kind of in love with the idea of writing everything in Ruby (or something similar) and when it makes sense and can be provably improved, extract it out in something like Go or C. The Go+Ruby combination in particular is super attractive to me, and it's likely going to be fine for the foreseeable future, I think. --- [1]: https://github.com/holman/ama/issues/698#issuecomment-118958... > The recent post from Parse Engineering Team [...] if you look at GitHub also, the number of Ruby repos are getting lower over these months. I think looking at these examples don't the whole picture here. GitHub, for example, is a fairly feature-complete product, and their next few years will likely focus on optimization work. If you have a mature product, you have a very clear performance profile of what's breaking, what's fast, and what's slow. That's why GitHub, a seven year old company, is more likely to open source Go libraries at this stage of its life rather than Ruby libraries (for example)- it's obvious which use cases can be targeted for speed, maintainability, and shareability. Parse is another clear example of this- they have a codebase that they've worked with for quite some time, with obvious spots of improvement, so they switched to Go. If you're looking at new companies that need a fair bit of creativity, product development, and development speed, I think Ruby makes a lot of sense. Premature optimization is not just a waste of time, it's an exponential waste of time, as you might head in a wrong product direction that can potentially sink the entire company. > I am wondering what's will be the next language gonna rule like PHP. Though there are JS tech is in the peak, I still not convinced to use it on server side. Go and Rust looks promising. I'm really the wrong person to ask here, but I can't really imagine anything taking over like PHP did for the next five years or so. That was a pretty meteoric explosion, and there weren't a lot of clear and open source options fifteen years ago. I don't see JavaScript development being a flash in the pan, I think Go is clearly going to continue to increase in popularity, and I think languages like Ruby and Python and PHP will probably hit a decent cruising speed for the time being. Even .Net technologies have a brighter future ahead of them again. There's a lot of choice right now, there's a lot of resources flooding into open source from companies who clearly want to compete in the community, and there's a ton of stealing of good ideas between communities rather than getting siloed off in the past. A decade from now, yeah, things may be completely different, but for the time being there's a lot of exciting choices and options happening. Kind of love it.
In Ruby has been fast enough for 13 years

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