Rails is a wonderful piece of technology, but what really sets it apart is its community.

Most communities don't last this long. 

Most communities aren’t as generous with their time and knowledge. 

Most communities aren’t as fun. 

Most communities aren't united by an underlying philosophy. 

Most communities aren't so diverse. 

To understand what makes the Ruby on Rails community special, we should briefly examine its origins. (And if you’re wondering “What even is Ruby on Rails?”, don’t run away, just read this quick post first.)

Rails was built as a passion project by a young Danish engineer named David Heinemeier Hanson, and Ruby comes from Yukihiro Matsumoto, affectionately known in the Ruby community as Matz. 

David’s Rails project served as a love letter to the Ruby programming language, which itself was created as a love letter to a host of other object-oriented programming languages in the 90's. 

Rails is the most successful Ruby project ever, and it deeply inherits Ruby's principles. The Ruby community has a saying, and an acronym for it, too: “Matz Is Nice, And So We Are Nice.” Or MINASWAN. 

When I first heard MINASWAN, I found the saying a bit dorky but also endearing. Now, I understand it's no joke! This ethos is everywhere in the Ruby and Rails communities, and the passion, joy, and generosity that stem from these two creations permeate today's communities.

Popularity hasn’t gone to its head

Rails exploded in popularity in the mid-2000s when Web 2.0 was officially kicking off. Computers and internet access were becoming more widespread, the smartphone was soon to come, and cloud computing was around the corner. 

Ruby on Rails came in promising startups and businesses that it was the most productive way to build the booming services in demand. And it proved to be true. 

As Rails became the go-to framework to get projects going, it became culturally omnipresent in the tech industry for a good five years. (In tech, that's a really long time!) And when these projects matured into companies of massive scale, like Twitter, AirBnB, and Shopify, Rails continued to be successful.

Yet despite being the talk of the tech industry, the Rails community was filled with people with little ego relative to the impact they were having. 

While some projects start out as open source, they seldom remain that way once there is a strong profit motive or business success. Despite being the backbone of many huge tech companies, Rails has remained open source for over 20 years.

To this day, some of the greatest contributions to the framework come from these large companies and their top talent, benefitting everyone in the ecosystem, including other businesses and developers like myself.

Welcoming to noobs

The early 2010's saw a rise of coding boot camps as a non-traditional track to landing a development job. Non-tech degree? No degree? It didn't matter. “Matz is nice, and so we are nice” was the attitude aspiring developers encountered when working within the Rails community. 

And this extends to Rails and Ruby conferences and meetups worldwide. I regularly attend the Ruby Chicago meetup, as well as online ones, and the vibes are friendly and curious, with a through line of enthusiasm that is quite comforting.

The human element of programming

David put the business value first with Rails, and Matz put developers first with Ruby.

Ruby is a programming language optimized for developer happiness. It's meant to be readable, flexible, delightful to write, and powerful, fostering a community of productive developers who are inclined to be welcoming. 

There are other programming languages I am conceptually a fan of for technical reasons, but they are often harder to work with productively due to a fractured community. Everyone is doing their own thing, solving the same problems in different ways, rather than building on each other’s stable solutions.

Gem-orosity

The Ruby and Rails community gives back as generously as it receives. Packages called gems are publicly hosted for all to use. There are go-to gems for everything from email to pagination, data aggregation, web scraping, and authentication, all maintained by the community itself and loved by developers for their reliability.

It’s okay to be technical and fun

Although less modern tutorial content is available, a strong decade's worth of blog posts, books, YouTube videos, online tutorials, and newsletters on all things Ruby and Rails prevails, all written with so much passion and generosity! 

I'm sure the culture of the time plays a role, but so many of these resources are quite quirky, too. I think of 99 Bottles of OOP by Sandi Metz, Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby web comic tutorial, and Ruby Koans series.

The Rails community has grown more senior and mature, built from contributions of over 7,000 developers, including dozens of heavyweights. It consists of developers with decades of experience (many of whom have since worked with new technologies but still have a soft spot for Rails and its enthusiast community) and newer devs like myself (who find its inclusivity so inspiring that we have to blog about it!).

The Ruby on Rails community is passionate about this powerful web framework and its vibrant ecosytem, and JMG shares in that excitement, building its company website using Ruby on Rails to leveraged the framework's flexibility and efficiency. We apply these same principles to craft exceptional web applications for our clients. If you're looking to build a web app, we'd be happy to discuss how Ruby on Rails could be the ideal solution.