I Spent an Hour Learning Who DHH Is. That Was Enough.

I knew about Omarchy for a while before today. I never looked into it properly, because on the surface there wasn't much to look into – it's a set of very specific dotfiles, an Arch install with somebody's exact preferences baked in, exported onto the internet and given a name that makes it sound like more than that. Fine. People do that. It's basically a fancy distro built out of one man's config files, and I filed it away as "not my thing" rather than "worth investigating the man behind it."

An hour ago I actually looked into the man behind it. I wish I hadn't needed a reason to, and I wish the reason weren't this bad.

The Post About London

The thing that sent me down the hole was a post DHH wrote about London's demographics – "As I remember London" – where he leans on a phrase like "native Brits" as though it's a neutral, purely factual category. It isn't. Multiple people who actually read the post closely worked out what he meant by it fairly quickly: when he says "native," he means white. London is a city where a large share of the population is white British and a large share isn't, and DHH's framing treats only the first group as properly, originally belonging there – regardless of whether the second group was also born and raised on the same streets.

That's not a slip of phrasing. It's a euphemism doing exactly the job euphemisms are built to do – letting you say something and then act baffled when someone points out what you actually said. One critique I read laid the pattern out plainly: DHH apparently thinks that even if you were born in the UK, you only really count as British if you're white, that he wouldn't consider living in a city that has "too many" people of colour, and that he reaches for old, tired tropes about the danger posed by Asian men in the same piece. Somebody who actually grew up non-white in London wrote about how painful it was to watch someone with no connection to the city lecture Londoners about who counts as native to it.

I don't think I need to spell out what that pattern is called. You already know.

It Wasn't a One-Off

Here's the bit that actually tipped this from "one bad post" into "a pattern I should have clocked years ago if I'd been paying attention": this isn't new, and it isn't isolated.

Duke University's library staff wrote up why they dropped Basecamp as a tool entirely, and the trail they followed is instructive. It started with a post of DHH's celebrating the US Supreme Court ending race-conscious college admissions, linked to another post of his dismissing DEI outright, and a third cheering on companies banning political discussion at work. Reading those together, the library staff described finding an ugly thread of thought running underneath all of it, dressed up as reasonable-sounding commentary. That's not me editorialising – that's a university library service, an institution about as far from outrage-baiting as you can get, reaching that conclusion after actually reading his writing rather than a screenshot of it.

And then there's the older stuff. Basecamp – DHH's own company – banned "societal and political discussions" at work in 2021, in a move that read very differently once it came out that part of the backstory was a long-running internal list of "funny" customer surnames employees had kept for years, several of them plainly mocking people's ethnic backgrounds. The politics ban landed, conveniently, right as employees were trying to actually talk about that.

One thing at a time, you could maybe write off as a bad week. A pattern spanning years, several separate posts, and his own company's internal culture is not a bad week. It's a worldview.

The Community Tried to Say Something, and He Called It Nonsense

None of this happened quietly. A group of Ruby on Rails developers put together an open letter this past September – "Plan Vert" – asking the Rails Core team to fork the framework away from DHH entirely and build a modern code of conduct without him attached to it. Roughly 140 people signed it, citing his racist and transphobic views alongside a general pattern of behaviour they didn't think belonged at the front of a major open-source project.

DHH's own response was to call it a "sad contingent" of malcontents trying, yet again, to cancel him – framing years of documented rhetoric as nothing more than people being mad at him for no reason. When a journalist asked him, apparently half-jokingly, whether he was in fact a Nazi – riffing on the petition's own WWII-resistance-themed name – his response was to make light of the question rather than take the underlying accusation seriously at all.

That's the tell, for me. Not the joke itself, but what the joke is doing: it's a way of never having to actually engage with what's being said about him. Mock the framing, dodge the substance, repeat as needed.

The Transphobia Isn't Buried Either

The London post is the one that's had the most attention this month, but the petition against DHH names two posts, not one – the second being a piece he wrote about a primary school running Gender and Sexuality Alliance lunch meetings for kids as young as eight. His objection wasn't really about curriculum oversight or informed consent, however he dressed it up. It was about the existence of the programme at all – kids that age being allowed anywhere near the idea that queer people exist and that being a good ally is something worth learning about.

I'm queer myself, not trans, so I want to be careful not to speak over the group he was most directly aiming at there. But I recognised the shape of it instantly anyway, because it's the same shape it always is: frame the mere presence of queer people, or queer acceptance, as something children need protecting from. Treat existing as a "programme" to be scrutinised rather than a fact of life some kids in that school were already living. Those kids didn't choose to need a safe lunch meeting. They needed one because the alternative was worse, and DHH's response to that was suspicion rather than the most basic decency.

What actually gets me about it is the smallness of it. This is a man with a framework used across huge swathes of the internet, a company, a public platform most developers would kill for – and he's spending some of that on being unsettled by eight-year-olds learning to be kind to each other. All of the people he's talking about, in both posts, just want to live their lives without somebody treating their existence as up for debate. He gets to punch down at that from a position where nothing about his own life is remotely precarious, and the framework he built doesn't make the argument any more correct. It just makes more people hear it.

Why I Actually Care About This

Where I'm Actually Stood

I should say plainly where I'm stood before I go further, because it matters here: I'm white and Anglo-Scottish, my whole family's from here, but I wasn't born in Britain myself. So even by DHH's own logic, the "native Brits" label he's reaching for doesn't quite land on me cleanly either. Nothing about that framing was ever going to catch me in its net the way it would catch someone he's actually trying to write out of the category.

Digging at "Native" Until It Breaks

And while we're picking at the category itself: "native Britons," if you go back far enough, are specifically the Brythonic Celts – the Common Brittonic-speaking people who were already here, whose descendants are the Welsh, the Cornish, and the Bretons who crossed to France later. The English are the ones who turned up after, migrating in from the continent as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes centuries later and pushing the actual natives west into Wales and Cornwall in the process. Worth noting, since it's too neat not to: the Jutes came from Jutland, which is to say Denmark, which is to say DHH's own country. So even the "invading migrant" side of this story is one he's got more skin in than the "native" one he's trying to claim. Worth saying, for the sake of not overclaiming my own stake in this: my own heritage is more Goidelic than Brythonic – the Gaelic-speaking branch out of Ireland and Scotland rather than the Brittonic one – so I'm not even claiming the specific lineage I'm defending here, just the wider Celtic one that DHH's framing manages to erase either way. So if DHH wants to play the who-was-here-first game, he's already picked the wrong side of it – and if you go back far enough again, past the Brythons, past everyone, we're all originally from Africa, Ethiopia specifically by most of the evidence. There's no version of "native" that survives being followed back to its actual root. It just stops being useful the further you push it, which is usually a sign the word was never doing honest work to begin with.

The One Where I'm Not Just an Outsider

The Gender and Sexuality Alliance post is a different story, or at least closer to one. I'm queer, though not trans, so I wasn't the specific target of that piece either – but I know what it's like to have your existence treated as a topic for debate rather than a fact, and that one landed somewhere the London post didn't.

Why I'm Saying Something Anyway

But that's exactly why I think it's worth saying something. This isn't a case of me being personally wounded and reaching for the biggest word I've got. It's me reading what he wrote, reading what people who actually live that reality had to say about it, and not being able to find a more honest word than racist for the pattern underneath it. If anything, writing this from outside the group he was talking about feels like the bare minimum – noticing doesn't cost me anything, and staying quiet about it because it doesn't touch me directly would be its own kind of complicity.

I don't cover politics on this blog very often, and normally I wouldn't reach for a word like racist about a real, named person without being genuinely sure I meant it. I mean it here. Not "he said something a bit tone-deaf" – a sustained, years-long pattern of rhetoric that multiple independent people, from university librarians to fellow developers to people who actually grew up in the city he was condescending about, have all landed on the same word to describe.

Where That Leaves Me and Omarchy

Ruby on Rails runs an enormous amount of the internet I use daily. Omarchy is, by design, downstream of one man's personal taste in tooling, dressed up as a distribution. I'm not going to pretend either of those things vanishes because I'm angry – infrastructure doesn't care how I feel about the person who built it. But knowing what I know now, I'm not going to pretend I didn't know it either, and I'm not going to describe Omarchy to anyone else again as just "a fancy set of dotfiles" without also mentioning whose dotfiles they are, and what he's spent the last several years saying in public while people asked him not to.

What I'm Actually Tired Of

I'm tired of this specific shape of person. The one who builds one genuinely useful thing, decides that makes him qualified to sort humanity into who belongs and who doesn't, and then acts baffled or amused when anyone objects. Being good at software was never a licence to look down on people for something they didn't choose and can't change. "I created Ruby on Rails" isn't an argument. It's a framework. It doesn't make anyone more correct about who counts as native to a city, and it doesn't make anyone more entitled to decide whether eight-year-olds are allowed to learn kindness at lunch.

So I'll say it plainly, not just as someone who builds software on top of the ecosystem he still sits at the head of, but as a person who'd like to think he has some basic decency: I stand with the people trying to get DHH out of Rails. Not because a fork is a magic fix – it isn't, and it won't undo anything he's already said – but because the alternative is pretending a framework that runs a huge share of the internet needs this particular man's name attached to it forever, and it doesn't.

I got here an hour late. I'd rather be an hour late and disgusted than never look at all.