Ruby, Rails, and the Open Source Community

Ruby, Rails, and
the Open Source
Community

Created and released in 1995
as open source by
Yukihiro Matsumoto.

⟵ This Guy.

Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto

Ruby is simple & elegant, but yet
extremely powerful and complex.

-199.abs # 199
"ruby is cool".length # 12
"Your mother is nice.".index("u") # 2
"Nice Day Isn't It?".downcase.split("").uniq.sort.join # " '?acdeinsty"

Ruby didn’t get much attention outside of
Japan until 1999.

In 2005 with the rise
of Ruby on Rails, Ruby as a language
started gaining international attention.

Created in 2003 as part of
Basecamp at 37signals.

Released as open source in
2004 by it’s creator,
David Heinemeier Hansson.

⟵ This Guy.

David Heinemeier Hansson (dhh)

Rails is a MVC web-
development framework.

Based on Convention over Conﬁguration
(CoC) and Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY)
principles.

Rails all of a sudden allowed web-
developers to build stunning and complex
web applications faster than ever before.

And it was fun too :)

Rails currently powers a large number of
high and low proﬁle websites.

• Penny Arcade • iLike
• Urban Dictionary • Kongregate
• Shopify • SoundCloud
• Justin.tv • and more...

Both Ruby, and Rails have gained most of
their traction thanks to being open
source, and the communities that grew
around the two projects.

Ruby v1.9.0 switched to a new and faster
interpreter called YARV. Developed by
Koichi Sasada.

(no photo this time, thanks Google)

In short, Ruby ofﬁcially adopted a new
core technology developed by a member
of the open source community.

Ruby on Rails has to date nearly 1400
contributors, and over 13000 commits in
the ofﬁcial Git repository.

The Merb and Rails merger is one of
many examples of how versatile open
source communities really are.

Git and GitHub has obviously been a very
successful tool for the Rails Core Team.

Thanks to Rails moving to GitHub around
the time of GitHub’s public launch, the
Ruby community was one of the ﬁrst to
fully embrace Git and GitHub.

GitHub User & Language Map

Ruby
Python
Perl

Also, humor is always important.

Developing with
Rails Plugins

Thanks to an enormous amount of
plugins available for Rails, you can
sometimes get close to a feature
complete product in hours.

Some Favorite Rails Plugins

• AuthLogic: Complete and fully featured User
Authentication system. (30 minutes)

• AuthLogic Extensions: Facebook Connect, OAuth,
OpenID, and more. (10-30 minutes each)

• Delayed Job: Easily run background processes for email
sending or other long running tasks, by changing a single
line of code. (5 minutes)

• Whenever: Easily conﬁgure and update crontasks (10
minutes)

There are many many more amazing
plugins and gems which simpliﬁes your life
tremendously.

Now go digging yourself ;)

Thanks for Watching

Rails Impact Graph taken from:
http://github.com/rails/rails/graphs/impact

GitHub User & Language map taken from:
http://lumberjaph.net/blog/index.php/2010/03/07/github-explorer-a-preview/

Jim Myhrberg (contact@jimeh.me) http://jimeh.me/

Ruby, Rails, and the Open Source Community

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