Agreed about the article tone. I'm a Deno lifer over here, and will definitely not try to cover up the mistakes they've made along the way or the trouble their deploy product has had over the past few months. Ryan Dahl is obviously polarizing as a personality for many people, always has been since he decided to "hate almost all software" or even before that when he created Node.js.

I don't use Fresh. Serverless is kind of a weird offering that forces developers to do a lot of work to adjust their programs to running all over the place. I even wish Deno had never supported NPM because that ruined their differentiator.

I'm going to keep using Deno and I hope they use this opportunity to refocus on their core product offering so that I can move back to using it from this VPS that is hosting all of my Deno servers right now.

True! Love to Ryan from my heart. He came around the corner with Node just in the right moment when ActionScript3 started to die and I seamlessly could continue my career and building things. Still to today.. Things with Deno are very ambitious and hard to establish in this space. The blog post is embarrassing.

Agreed. I was skeptical of Deno and I think their package management story was a mistake. But the people were still trying to make JavaScript better and doing so out of genuine love for the language. I especially feel for the employees who put in several years of their life, with the resulting opportunity cost.

Yeah, the tone felt off to me too. It felt a bit too much like a celebration of "look how right I was" concerning their earlier posts.

Agreed. It is very easy to criticise if you've never been in the hot seat, and if you've never had to make tough decisions like this. As far as I can tell this person has never run a business with actual employees.

If Dahl had posted the typical layoff announcement people would be criticising that too.

Yeah, on top of that bringing in social media politics into it is weird, makes it hard to take this as pure/useful criticism

Given the footer of the blog I’m not surprised the author really enjoys the smell of his own farts.

I'm just annoyed that decimation would be a 10% layoff; standard if even weak-sauce these days. Too many people use "kill one in ten" to mean "kill them all, let God sort it out."

Some businesses don't need to be VC backed though.

That is the problem.

> calling out Ryan directly for some reason

Accountability starts and stops at the top. Many CEOs (CxOs) get called out. Personally, I want to write something similar about Bluesky leadership, who have fumbled hard multiple times since peaking, and have now "raised funding" from Bain Capital (private equity).

Fuck this blog post.

I'll say it.

This author is being an asshole and punching good people when they're down.

We live in a land of goddamned hyperscalers and megacorps trying to minimize how much they pay us (or get rid of us). Trillion dollar Zeuses that skirt by antitrust regulations for decades on end, crushing any would-be competition. Pilfering from open source while encrusting it in proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg. Destroying the open web, turning every channel into an advertising shakedown, monitoring us, spying on us, cozying up to the spy apparatus in every country they do business in...

How dare anyone throw rocks at an open source effort?

I don't even like JavaScript, but I applaud what these folks are trying to do.

At least they're trying.

Can't even get a decent round of applause.