At the end of RailsConf this year Jonan and Ruby Central launched the Ruby Central Membership Program for $25/month. Not only will I be happily paying that, but if they let me I fully intend to pay more, and this article explains my reasoning.
Shopify
The single biggest company contributor to Ruby with no close second, whether financially or through direct code investments, Shopify, is where we'll be starting.
To be clear I like the people there, I have many dear friends who work there, and I'm thrilled at what they're doing in the community to help grow Ruby. It is by no means intended as a disparagement of their efforts to say this:
This is the single biggest weakness of the Ruby community.
We have placed many of our hopes and dreams for growing the language and the community squarely on their shoulders, and should anything ever happen to Shopify the community would not survive as it does today.
Certainly they are not the only ones to financially and directly step up, but they are a significant portion of those efforts with several core contributors in both Ruby and Rails as well as a lion's share of funding.
Stepping Up
They can't do it alone, nor should they. While there are other companies which are involved they're becoming few and far between with dwindling contributions from companies that in the past would be actively invested.
Communities only grow when we all pitch in and share their burdens together. We cannot and must not take for granted all the work it takes to keep things running whether that be our conferences, meetups, ruby gems, infrastructure, or otherwise.
That doesn't have to be millions of dollars, no, it can start with even a hundred or two and grow from there. A community is not made by only large donors, but by everyone coming together for collective interests.
Giving Back
Ruby gave me a career, friends, community, financial security, and in many ways purpose. It would not be an exaggeration to say I am who I am today because of it, and to me that means investing back in the community.
Perhaps that's financial, but it doesn't have to be. Perhaps it's also community involvement, teaching, writing, contributing to common tooling, hiring new devs, or otherwise. I believe we have an obligation to give back, to send the ladder back down for the next generation, and invest in a future we'd like to see and build towards it together.
If you have the means I would encourage you to invest financially.
The Next Shopify
I want to see the next Shopify emerge, and another and another after that. I'm greedy, I want to see 10, 20, dare I say 50 companies contributing and investing to even half of what Shopify has done.
If one company can have such a substantial impact what can happen when the community and companies using Ruby and Rails join together?
Well that's what makes Ruby and Rails magic: our community, and we can invest in growing and cultivating that community.
Invest
This is my call to action for those reading:
Consider investing in Ruby Central. Consider investing in a future where Ruby grows and flourishes, where local meetups and conferences number so many that you can't possibly go to all of them in a year, where we can onboard junior engineers faster than bootcamps and colleges can graduate them, and where we see this language that gave us everything flourish.
We need everyone, and everyone starts with each one of us. Together we can do amazing things.
You can start a membership on the top-right of the page via "Sign In" or "Sign Up" and selecting a professional membership.
Top comments (10)
I've been a Ruby developer for almost my entire developer career and I'd be more than willing to pay for a Ruby Central membership, but... other than supporting the Rubygems infrastructure, what is that money for?
I'm not from US, so I can't say I'm thrilled by RubyCentral's decision to keep RubyConf and RailsConf in the US and I think it's more appropriate for RubyCentral to work with companies to get funding for the RubyGems infrastructure. What else is RubyCentral planning to do with the potential extra funding?
To put it into context, FSF would mail (actual, physical mail) a couple of stickers and some brochure with their yearly goals and activities. It wasn't great, but at least they tried to get me involved. For $300/year RubyCentral offers just access to a private Discord server.. I'm at a loss for words.
Those would be questions for Ruby Central as I am not a board member, so I cannot speak to them in an official capacity.
That said, I do not agree with the perspective that it's about what's in it for us. It's about what's in it for the community, and that happens to be a large focus of what they want to do next as they highlight in the closing keynote for RailsConf.
The short version of this, as I understand it, is to seriously invest in infrastructure and resourcing to boot up new local meetups and expand existing ones. Once those reach a decent size they can be spun into local conferences, and perhaps larger regional ones over time.
Personally I had suggested also investing directly in these leaders to level them up and start creating successors to ensure we don't lose locales again when someone steps down.
Bluntly put companies are widely not investing. Investment happens far more locally than it does at a national level, which means getting local communities reignited should be a core concern.
As it exists today Ruby relies on Shopify and a small handful of companies. That's not sustainable, neither for Ruby nor for those companies.
I agree that a community is much healthier when it does not directly depend on a couple of companies (basically Shopify, Github, and 37signals) and it would be great if we had more companies pitch in.
However, I'm talking about the individual contributor, that would pay $300 per year to be a RubyCentral 'professional member". Of course I should ask "what's in it for me?" because I would be paying a non-trivial amount of money (not everybody lives in the Bay Area) and I would want to understand how it benefits me. One good example is more local conferences, as this will increase awareness and, most likely, end up increasing the demand for Ruby developers which does benefit me directly. I'd also argue that one of the amazing things in the 00s about Ruby was that you had so many developers with such a diverse background that a lot of knowledge was passed around, so that's also something that benefits me.
But I can't really see RubyCentral working for growing the community. All their events are in the US and, as somebody living in Europe, are pretty much out of reach due to cost and travel distance (this year's RailsConf would have costed me $3000+ if you factor in the ticket price, the airplane tickets, hotels and so on).
Don't get me wrong, I want to support the community as much as possible. I've sponsored people like Ryan Davis on Github because I personally use his software every day, I've subscribed to GoRails and Drifting Ruby just to encourage them to continue building content for Ruby developers and I'd love to support RubyCentral, but there has to be a plan somewhere before asking for money. I'm willing to pitch in, but I won't pay $25/month for access to a private Discord server...
There will be Rails World in Amsterdam this fall, so finally we can go to a big Rails conference without crossing the Atlantic!
If you look at the contributing members of the Rails Foundation, it is obvious there are more companies who are willing to pledge money to improve the Rails ecosystem, so I don't see where is this idea of Shopify being the single biggest weakness of the community coming from.
I will get some hate for this probably, but I think RubyCentral is probably trying to get sponsorship, because bringing politics into the community and trying to force their ideology to others in the community kinda backfired and RailsConf wasn't a sell-out(with the high priced tickets they still made some profit probably though).
That is a fair point RE: affordability and US centricism, and something I've brought up with folks as a core concern at the conference even before this post was written.
Trust me when I say I've been plenty critical of those gaps myself, which is why I'm excited to see them engaging on those finally.
There are some plans in motion on that already, and since talk is cheap I'm also directly rebooting the SF Ruby meetup soon and will network with others in the meetup scene to create a guide book on how to do the same.
Personally I would like to see more direct investment in areas which do not have coverage already, and Europe is one of those areas where we could be increasing presence. We're not just the US.
The way I see it though is that we need to partition out how we deal with areas. Something along the lines of local (city like SF), regional (area like Pacific Northwest), country (US), continental (Europe, SA, etc), and global (moving around).
To do that we need to create leaders capable of 800+ person conferences, prove out interest levels, and set a foundation. Without those it becomes hard to invest, but I see those efforts starting to take root and will be driving towards seeing them land.
What I said is that Shopify and a small subset of companies are contributing to either, which is a problem, because if any of them fail and especially if Shopify fails the community will be in a very bad position. That's the weakness, not that I somehow dislike them, but that if they're ever not here we have a problem.
Insofar as politics? I'm not biting on that, and it's a core reason I have you blocked on Twitter. I've seen how you treat people, and will not engage after this reply.
So if I tell someone I don't agree with them, that's mistreatment? :) Fair enough.
I don't think that's true. What you are doing is scaremongering and asking for money so we can be safe from the dangers you are inventing. The only danger here is that there is an alternative to RubyCentral now, welcoming everyone not just the folks thinking the way they think and that puts RubyCentral into a tough spot.
But still, I wish that they will make through this and they will change their attitude and act on being inclusive not just talking about it.
Don't take me wrong, I think Shopify does an amazing job for the community to pay many Ruby and Rails contributors to work on open-source, but if Shopify would go bust tomorrow, we would still carry on pretty much as before. Just look at history, before Shopify became this successful, the progress in Ruby and Rails were kinda the same.
I wonder if it is not something that could be addressed by RC, maybe indirectly. I'm just thinking out loud, but perhaps it could help to come up with a "Ruby Central License", with which large companies are required to pay for using and, say, 40% goes to RC and 60% to maintainers. This way some money goes to RC from companies and maintainers are freed up from the licensing headache. I'm not sure if it's legally viable though.
That aside, something deep inside me is strongly against "yeah, we can't make the companies pay so try to move the burden to individual people, because it's easier". I understand this is not what you are trying to do, but it is what is generally happening.
What i hate about ruby is more gems not updated, i see golang and javascript more update than it
Have a few examples? I'm afraid this isn't related to Ruby Central, but to the gem authors themselves.
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