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Finally made it! Congratulations! Zawinski's Law “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced b

Finally made it! Congratulations! Zawinski's Law “Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.” --- Action Mailbox routes incoming emails to controller-like mailboxes for processing in Rails. It ships with ingresses for Amazon SES, Mailgun, Mandrill, Postmark, and SendGrid. You can also handle inbound mails directly via the built-in Exim, Postfix, and Qmail ingresses. The foundational work on Action Mailbox was done by George Claghorn and yours truly.

jjeaff 7y ago
Funny, I first saw this law mentioned yesterday in a discussion about a new PHP Laravel package for handling incoming mail.
- stunt 7y ago
  Rails and Laravel have many things in common. In some cases one is ahead of the other one.
- kirubakaran 7y ago
  Once you hear about Baader-Meinhof effect, you see Baader-Meinhof effect everywhere.
rxhernandez 7y ago
I sincerely mean no harm by this but: Web developers are to the rest of developers what internet people in the us are to the rest of the world. That is, I think y'all forget that there are many other types of development that look nothing like web development. I think I might come very close to losing my mind if I worked somewhere where someone arbitrarily sticks code to read mail in the firmware I was working on.
- lovetocode 7y ago
  It sounds like you are implying that web developers are beneath you. Building web based software is more complex than slapping together some HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
  - rxhernandez 7y ago
    I am absolutely not saying that. What part of any of that says they are beneath me? When a European tells an American that they're not the only ones on the internet you people don't jump down their throats. When I do it you people lose your collective shit.
    - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
      When a European preemptively tells an American that they're not the only ones on the Internet based on stereotypes about Americans, then yeah, that's kind of offensive. You've insulted Americans based on stereotypes, insulted web developers based on stereotypes, and when people point it out to you, you keep doubling down on it. Let this Ugly American suggest to you that perhaps you should consider following the First Rules of Holes: when you're in one, stop digging.
- davidw 7y ago
  It's sort of a metaphor for bloat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
  - rxhernandez 7y ago
    Even then, that level of bloat is unique to certain types of development. In more regulated industries, like medical devices, more code can translate to high regulatory costs.
- mhink 7y ago
  Oh, get over yourself. That quote doesn't have anything to do with web development (and for that matter, it hardly has anything to do with mailboxes, except as a tongue-in-cheek example of an extraneous feature) so I have no idea why you feel the need to take a swing at another discipline that you clearly don't know the first thing about.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - rxhernandez 7y ago
    I get now that what I said was off putting. Frankly, it was a reflection on the many times I have seen web developers act like they are the only people in the room. I thought, at best, people would find some humor in it; because when a group tends to dominate discussions and when a smaller group points it out, it's not uncommonly seen as "oh yeah, Haha that is a little absurd." At worst, I thought people would just dismiss my quick quip or tell me that I need to reconsider the current state of affairs because of new developments in this field. Unfortunately, I missed the fact that pointing out that bloat is disproportionately there on the web dev side, would cause people to think that I am stating web developers have intrinsic problems themselves. That was not remotely my intent, my intent was to point out how silly it was that web developers think they are the only people in the room, as well as the fact that, things dont have to be this way in web development because many other fields don't have this problem to nearly the same extent. However, the onus was on me to recognize how it would be perceived and thus not say it at all or find a much much better way to phrase it. With that said, I think you should take a look into verbal abuse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_abuse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_abuse I disparaged the field that you and I work in and you disparage my identity and humiliate me in one of the few communities I felt some sort of safety in. You attacking my identity is outright wrong and at least borderline abusive. What you said was painful for me and caused me to get exceptionally upset. You need to realize that the field you and I share is not our identities. In fact, if you said one of my previous fields had problems, I would agree or tell you that you need to reconsider x, y, and z because of j, k, and l. Moreover, you don't know me or my background. I've worked in web development, biomedical algorithms engineering, scientific instruments and data analytics. I have the experience to contrast what I have experienced in web development. Yet you didn't bother to ask if I had any experience with web development. Instead you outright attacked me saying I dont have a clue about what I'm talking about.
- dwaite 7y ago
  Thats fine - just realize your competitors will eventually do it.
  - rxhernandez 7y ago
    My previous competitors will not put code to email people inside medical devices. It was hard enough to not get a lawsuit with core code going haywire.
    - Operyl 7y ago
      Jesus, you took the grandparent comment way too literally. Take a break, dude, the internet isn't out to get you.
      - rxhernandez 7y ago
        I was downvoted into oblivion to the point where people are downvoting comments in other threads that had positive upvotes for awhile; told to get over myself; told that I look down on people. I've had my identity attacked for what? Because I pointed out that their field is messier than others? If someone told me something wrong with my field I wouldn't attack their identity, I would go you know what you're probably right or say you know, I think you're not considering x y and z. I wouldn't outright attack their identity. You people are honestly being bullies right now to the point where it's borderline abusive.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        Operyl 7y ago
        They're internet points, they mean _nothing_. You are freaking out over a joke grandparent comment, and you're being downvoted here because of your overreaction. You wrote a paragraph to my simple comment of suggesting you disengage, but perhaps you really do just want this outrage. Good luck.
      - 7y ago
- gitgud 7y ago
  > Web developers are to the rest of developers what internet people in the us are to the rest of the world. You mean no harm, but this comes off as a little offence... Besides that, I understand what you're saying.
  - rxhernandez 7y ago
    You're right; chipotle_coyote provided insight that convinced me why I was in the wrong. I've partially addressed this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20720618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20720618
- peteforde 7y ago
  I'm sorry that this comment got downvoted because I actually think this is a valid point even if I'm about to offer my perspective on why it shouldn't be a concern. We shouldn't be so thin-skinned. Nothing you weren't expecting, but: like many libraries which shipped with Rails, you can easily turn it off with a single comment character and never have to think about it again. In this sense, it's a tempest in a teapot. I never got excited about CoffeeScript, so I just commented it out. Big picture, Rails is often mistaken for a product but it is quite literally just a set of useful abstractions from Basecamp that hit critical mass when Basecamp launched. If other people find it useful, great - but that's never been the MO. Now, obviously Rails also has a life of its' own, and that's where the idea of convention over configuation kicks in. Basically, DHH has strongly-held opinions about the way things should be done to maximize the experience of building. The new multi-db support is another example of something that people have been building their own versions of since forever; by offering an opinionated generalized take on how the experts would do it, we all benefit from not having to reinvent the wheel. I honestly believe that this is why Rails is both successful and enduring. I love seeing all of the comments from people who were seduced by SPAs and are finding their way back to SSR Rails. The productivity and ease of hiring is just unparalleled, and commenting out ActiveText or whatever else you don't need takes away none of that.
- dang 7y ago
  I'm sure you didn't mean to, but please don't start tribal flamewars on HN. It just leads to tedious responses and worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
craz8 7y ago
Hah! And with not a lot of code and an ActionText integration, you can write some nice looking emails too! I can build my own Gmail in an hour!

jjeaff 7y ago

Funny, I first saw this law mentioned yesterday in a discussion about a new PHP Laravel package for handling incoming mail.

stunt 7y ago
Rails and Laravel have many things in common. In some cases one is ahead of the other one.
kirubakaran 7y ago
Once you hear about Baader-Meinhof effect, you see Baader-Meinhof effect everywhere.

rxhernandez 7y ago

I sincerely mean no harm by this but: Web developers are to the rest of developers what internet people in the us are to the rest of the world. That is, I think y'all forget that there are many other types of development that look nothing like web development. I think I might come very close to losing my mind if I worked somewhere where someone arbitrarily sticks code to read mail in the firmware I was working on.

lovetocode 7y ago
It sounds like you are implying that web developers are beneath you. Building web based software is more complex than slapping together some HTML, JavaScript and CSS.
- rxhernandez 7y ago
  I am absolutely not saying that. What part of any of that says they are beneath me? When a European tells an American that they're not the only ones on the internet you people don't jump down their throats. When I do it you people lose your collective shit.
  - chipotle_coyote 7y ago
    When a European preemptively tells an American that they're not the only ones on the Internet based on stereotypes about Americans, then yeah, that's kind of offensive. You've insulted Americans based on stereotypes, insulted web developers based on stereotypes, and when people point it out to you, you keep doubling down on it. Let this Ugly American suggest to you that perhaps you should consider following the First Rules of Holes: when you're in one, stop digging.
davidw 7y ago
It's sort of a metaphor for bloat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski
- rxhernandez 7y ago
  Even then, that level of bloat is unique to certain types of development. In more regulated industries, like medical devices, more code can translate to high regulatory costs.
mhink 7y ago
Oh, get over yourself. That quote doesn't have anything to do with web development (and for that matter, it hardly has anything to do with mailboxes, except as a tongue-in-cheek example of an extraneous feature) so I have no idea why you feel the need to take a swing at another discipline that you clearly don't know the first thing about.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rxhernandez 7y ago
  I get now that what I said was off putting. Frankly, it was a reflection on the many times I have seen web developers act like they are the only people in the room. I thought, at best, people would find some humor in it; because when a group tends to dominate discussions and when a smaller group points it out, it's not uncommonly seen as "oh yeah, Haha that is a little absurd." At worst, I thought people would just dismiss my quick quip or tell me that I need to reconsider the current state of affairs because of new developments in this field. Unfortunately, I missed the fact that pointing out that bloat is disproportionately there on the web dev side, would cause people to think that I am stating web developers have intrinsic problems themselves. That was not remotely my intent, my intent was to point out how silly it was that web developers think they are the only people in the room, as well as the fact that, things dont have to be this way in web development because many other fields don't have this problem to nearly the same extent. However, the onus was on me to recognize how it would be perceived and thus not say it at all or find a much much better way to phrase it. With that said, I think you should take a look into verbal abuse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_abuse https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verbal_abuse I disparaged the field that you and I work in and you disparage my identity and humiliate me in one of the few communities I felt some sort of safety in. You attacking my identity is outright wrong and at least borderline abusive. What you said was painful for me and caused me to get exceptionally upset. You need to realize that the field you and I share is not our identities. In fact, if you said one of my previous fields had problems, I would agree or tell you that you need to reconsider x, y, and z because of j, k, and l. Moreover, you don't know me or my background. I've worked in web development, biomedical algorithms engineering, scientific instruments and data analytics. I have the experience to contrast what I have experienced in web development. Yet you didn't bother to ask if I had any experience with web development. Instead you outright attacked me saying I dont have a clue about what I'm talking about.
dwaite 7y ago
Thats fine - just realize your competitors will eventually do it.
- rxhernandez 7y ago
  My previous competitors will not put code to email people inside medical devices. It was hard enough to not get a lawsuit with core code going haywire.
  - Operyl 7y ago
    Jesus, you took the grandparent comment way too literally. Take a break, dude, the internet isn't out to get you.
    - rxhernandez 7y ago
      I was downvoted into oblivion to the point where people are downvoting comments in other threads that had positive upvotes for awhile; told to get over myself; told that I look down on people. I've had my identity attacked for what? Because I pointed out that their field is messier than others? If someone told me something wrong with my field I wouldn't attack their identity, I would go you know what you're probably right or say you know, I think you're not considering x y and z. I wouldn't outright attack their identity. You people are honestly being bullies right now to the point where it's borderline abusive.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - Operyl 7y ago
        They're internet points, they mean _nothing_. You are freaking out over a joke grandparent comment, and you're being downvoted here because of your overreaction. You wrote a paragraph to my simple comment of suggesting you disengage, but perhaps you really do just want this outrage. Good luck.
    - 7y ago
gitgud 7y ago
> Web developers are to the rest of developers what internet people in the us are to the rest of the world. You mean no harm, but this comes off as a little offence... Besides that, I understand what you're saying.
- rxhernandez 7y ago
  You're right; chipotle_coyote provided insight that convinced me why I was in the wrong. I've partially addressed this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20720618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20720618
peteforde 7y ago
I'm sorry that this comment got downvoted because I actually think this is a valid point even if I'm about to offer my perspective on why it shouldn't be a concern. We shouldn't be so thin-skinned. Nothing you weren't expecting, but: like many libraries which shipped with Rails, you can easily turn it off with a single comment character and never have to think about it again. In this sense, it's a tempest in a teapot. I never got excited about CoffeeScript, so I just commented it out. Big picture, Rails is often mistaken for a product but it is quite literally just a set of useful abstractions from Basecamp that hit critical mass when Basecamp launched. If other people find it useful, great - but that's never been the MO. Now, obviously Rails also has a life of its' own, and that's where the idea of convention over configuation kicks in. Basically, DHH has strongly-held opinions about the way things should be done to maximize the experience of building. The new multi-db support is another example of something that people have been building their own versions of since forever; by offering an opinionated generalized take on how the experts would do it, we all benefit from not having to reinvent the wheel. I honestly believe that this is why Rails is both successful and enduring. I love seeing all of the comments from people who were seduced by SPAs and are finding their way back to SSR Rails. The productivity and ease of hiring is just unparalleled, and commenting out ActiveText or whatever else you don't need takes away none of that.
dang 7y ago
I'm sure you didn't mean to, but please don't start tribal flamewars on HN. It just leads to tedious responses and worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

craz8 7y ago

Hah! And with not a lot of code and an ActionText integration, you can write some nice looking emails too! I can build my own Gmail in an hour!