What are your thoughts on the Rails community?

I recently got to hang with my old co-worker @ridhwana to discuss the work she's been doing in the Rails community.

It was a great conversation. Here's what Ridhwana had to say:

So I think, I think there's, there's an army behind Rails and I think they're doing really good work. And whilst there is definitely controversy surrounding some of the things that DHH says it does. I think the roadmap that we're following on Rails is as, as one that's helping rails to grow.

What are your thoughts on the Rails community as either a seasoned Rails dev, a new one or even someone on the outside of the community?

If you're interested in the full conversation, you can catch it on YouTube.

Thanks again for hanging Ridhwana!

Comments

[Michael Lang]

This question prompts more questions than answers. I began with Rails 0.10 and back then, as I watched Ruby and Rails grow together, the community has ebbed and flowed with the times. Ruby and Rails community had singular goals of promoting Ruby and particularly Rails as a viable tool for launching and running SaaS businesses and we all rallied around building the best developer experience we possibly could and advocating for everything from Agile to "The Happy Developer is the Productive Developer."

Here's the question I have: What is the role, and purpose of both the Ruby and the Rails community today? It seems like the last time I checked in, and to be clear, I don't really "stay plugged into the community," the main theme was, "Rails is NOT dead." and the Ruby theme seemed to be much the same as we moved past the focus on performance improvements with the advent of Ruby 3.0 and more recently the YJIT introduction with "Ruby is NOT slow."

I tend not to be plugged into the community because I don't care to defend and I don't care for the controversies that do seem to swirl throughout the community. I do care that we have largely NOT fractured on our tooling and we have successfully navigated from the painful challenges of upgrading Rails 1 => 2 => 3 to a stable API that makes staying current a breeze and we successfully navigated perhaps the biggest challenge of Ruby 1.8 => 1.9 => 2.x with 3.x emerging as the defacto of the day.

Ruby and Rails are both strong and vibrant developer tooling and framework, but are we really truly focused on past reputation of both or are we starting to take more proactive, strong forward-looking stance as a community and simply be the best we can be and proud to be a Rubyist and, for many, strong Rails developer?