Au Revoir Rails Community

Time really flies!

Back in December 2005, Ruby on Rails 1.0 was released to the masses. I remember that was when I first got interested in Rails. Six months later, I was doing Rails development full time.

Rails pushed me to contribute to the project, to write plugins, to improve my Ruby knowledge, to release gems and to become a better engineer overall. I then joined the Merb project, focusing on problems I was facing in the various client projects I had back then.

The competition between Rails and Merb turned into a constant confrontation, splitting the Ruby community into two camps. A resolution was later achieved by merging the two teams and focusing our energy on Rails 3. This is how I became a part of the Activism team with Gregg and Ryan. In this new role I was given the opportunity to meet lots of different people from various backgrounds and different communities. I really had a lot of fun.

However, things have changed for me. I won’t be at Rails Conf 2010 because in a few weeks I will become a father for the first time. And with that, an obvious priority shift. My day job working on Playstation games is also quite time consuming and the little free time I manage to get to work on my own projects is spent on my MacRuby book. The disconnect between the Rails community and myself is probably more evident now than ever. The challenges encountered by most Railists are so different from the ones I face daily that I think others would do a much better job than I at advocating for Rails. So this is why I believe it’s time for me to step away from the Rails community, kick back and relax (and get ready to change a lot of diapers).

This is an “au revoir”, not an “Adieu”. I will continue to keep an eye on Rails 3 and the fast growing ecosystem.

I will still be writing Ruby for a living and will hopefully keep contributing to the projects I use. And I plan to keep on attending to Ruby conferences around the world just as soon as my kid is old enough to travel with me ;)

Finally, with the imminent release of Rails 3, I hope to see even more people stand up and advocate for Ruby on Rails the way Gregg Pollack, Ryan Bates and many others have done so far.