The Effect Blog was born out of a simple observation: the best programming debates aren't about right and wrong — they're about trade-offs that people pretend are moral imperatives. We write about those trade-offs, take sides, and back them up with data (or at least very confident opinions).
Our writers are working engineers who ship production code during the week and write inflammatory blog posts on the weekend. We don't always agree with each other, but we always agree that the status quo deserves to be questioned.
What People Are Saying
"I read their article on Ruby naming conventions and immediately renamed every variable in our Rails monolith to a full English sentence. Our deploy took 47 minutes longer but the code has never been more readable. 10/10 would refactor again."
— Matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto), Creator of Ruby
"The useEffect article finally validated what I've been telling my team for years. Everything is a side effect. Rendering? Side effect. State? Side effect. My career choices? Definitely a side effect."
— DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson), Creator of Ruby on Rails
"I switched my entire Git workflow to a GUI after reading their article. My terminal-only colleagues staged an intervention. I showed them the productivity data and now they all use GitKraken. The intervention backfired beautifully."
— Aaron Patterson (tenderlove), Ruby & Rails Core Team
"Their article about commenting every line of code changed my life. I now write comments that are longer than the code itself. My PRs take three days to review but nobody has ever misunderstood a single line. Worth it."
— Taylor Otwell, Creator of Laravel
"I've been using U+2800 for indentation in all my PHP projects since I read that article. My IDE doesn't understand it. My linter doesn't understand it. But my code survives being pasted into Facebook Messenger, and honestly, that's all that matters in 2026."
— Rasmus Lerdorf, Creator of PHP
"I made a 45-minute video about their '10 companies' article and it became my most controversial upload ever. Half the comments say it's genius. The other half say it's fraud. Engagement through the roof either way. Subscribe for part 2."
— Fireship (Jeff Delaney), YouTuber
"I tried to debunk their useEffect article in a livestream and accidentally convinced myself they were right. I've mass-replaced every useMemo in my tutorial codebase. My comment section has never been more alive."
— Theo (t3dotgg), YouTuber
"The Effect Blog is what happens when smart people have too much free time and access to a domain registrar. I mean that as the highest possible compliment. I've bookmarked every article and I'm not even ashamed."
— ThePrimeagen, YouTuber & Netflix Engineer
"Someone sent me the Git GUI article and I felt personally attacked. Then I re-read it with an open mind and realized I've been spending 25 minutes a day on Git operations that should take 5. I still use the CLI though. It's a lifestyle at this point."
— Fabien Potencier, Creator of Symfony
"I showed the Ruby naming article to my team and someone actually tried
email_notifications_for_users_whose_trial_period_is_expiring as a
module name. RubyMine's tab bar has never been wider. The code has never been
clearer. I'm conflicted."
— Sandi Metz, Author of "Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby"
"Low-level programming is about understanding the machine. The Effect Blog is about understanding that the machine doesn't care whether you use tabs or a Unicode Braille character. The machine just wants to compile. Let it compile."
— Ben Eater, YouTuber
Note: These testimonials are entirely real and were definitely not fabricated by the blog authors at 2 AM. Any resemblance to actual opinions held by these individuals is purely coincidental and frankly surprising.