You’re afraid that your Ruby skills are becoming irrelevant.
Ruby doesn’t seem to be as popular as it once was, and you don’t want to be part of a dying breed. You’re concerned about the language's future prospects, so it feels safer to stop wasting time and start learning a new programming language.
After all, one of the biggest problems with Ruby is that you learn it, fall in love with it, and then are sad when you're forced to use something else.
You know how productive you can be by taking advantage of a syntax that reads like prose and powerful frameworks that feel like an unfair advantage. However, some companies are switching to other technologies because it’s challenging to find skilled Ruby developers or because they are unwilling to invest in training them.
You’re already part of a mature and stable ecosystem.
Like you, there are many individuals and teams starting new projects using Ruby, and thousands of projects that are still running and waiting to be improved. There is a vast knowledge base from years of real-world experience, but it’s not always easy for you to take advantage of it when a lot of the resources are outdated.
Collaboration with others has become more challenging with a fragmented ecosystem and some opinionated approaches that discourage new ways of thinking, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
A Ruby Renaissance is underway:
- Conferences and meetups are taking place every month all around the world, emerging frameworks that bring new approaches to the ecosystem, such as Hanami, Phlex, RubyLLM, Roda, and Bridgetown.
- New developments in the tooling and developer experience with projects like Herb, Ruby LSP, Prism, and rv.
- Well-known long-running projects like Rails, Hombrebrew, Sidekiq, DragonRuby, Chef, and JRuby.
Important conversations are being lost
There is no shortage of places where the community is currently participating, but most of the conversations are happening behind chat platforms, and it's unstructured nature makes it difficult to find those really important conversations. Which chat room was the conversation in? How long ago was it? On what platform, channel happened?
For every chat community, there comes a day when the community grows so large that the conversations fall apart and the format of instant group messaging starts to lose its value. When you join a new group, you feel overwhelmed and can’t catch up on context. Valuable knowledge slips away as decisions and insights vanish into an endless scroll, quick reactions, and shallow comments.
A collaboration hub for the rest of us
We’re building a discussion forum for you to connect with other Ruby users to:
- Get inspired with new ideas and solutions.
- Ask questions to help you get started or unblocked.
- Seek specific advice on a problem you’re working on.
- Collaborate on projects to expand your knowledge.
- Expand your skills by working with alternative frameworks.
What's exactly different in a forum?
- Conversations are broken up into individual topics, making them browsable, searchable, and readable.
- A slower communication style encourages critical thinking and improves the quality of the conversation.
- Forums are built for large communities, and hundreds of people can simultaneously participate.
- Built-in trust system to defend you against trolls, bad actors, and spammers.
How you will benefit from joining?
- Clear structure with discussions organized by categories and tags.
- Keep discussions on-topic and reduce noise with strictly linear conversations.
- Find what you're looking for with a comprehensive, powerful advanced search.
- Avoid repeating yourself with similar questions or issues. You'll be able to point them to a library of common answers.
- Asynchronous nature effectively lowers the bar for including everyone in the conversation, no matter where in the world they are located.
How are we planning to run it?
- Collaborating with existing communities to complement each other.
- Operating in public, with visible norms and accountable leadership.
- Building a professional team to provide ongoing support and improvements.
- Creating a thoughtful onboarding so newcomers are welcomed and supported.
- Maintaining a long-term vision to strengthen the Ruby ecosystem.