Hello my dear Rubyist,
Today is a big day, a big milestone to celebrate. Exactly 10 years ago Lachie Cox made the first post to the Ruby or Rails Oceania (RORO) Google group. 10 years is a long time. Let’s quickly reflect on it.
Back in March 2007, you would have been ahead of the curve if you were using Ruby 1.8 and Rails 1.2.3. Just imagine: jQuery 1.0 is only 6 months old. The iPhone is yet to be released in late June. Twitter is about to celebrate its first birthday. The first Rails Camp in the world will be hosted three months from now. Ruby 1.9 will be released, only 9 months after that first RORO post, in December 2007. The Bundler gem won’t exist for another two years. That’s what it was like in March 2007.
Ten years ago technologies such as Go, Node, Elm, Elixir, Swift, Android, React, Angular, Ember, Rust, Crystal, CoffeeScript and companies like Airbnb and Uber could only be dreamed about by the most progressive thinkers.
Since 2007, the Ruby Community has grown and survived many waves of hyped technologies including Ruby itself and it is still stronger than ever. In the last 10 years the Australian Ruby Community alone has hosted 20 Rails Camps, 5 conferences, countless meetups, Rails Girls and other events. Rails Camps has spread to 8 other countries as well as other communities to become CampJS and ElixirCamp.
We should say a big thank you to all people who made the last 10 years such an incredible period, all of which is now part of history.
It’s hard to imagine what will happen in the next ten years.
To support the RORO community to continue to flourish for many years to come, today we are launching a new forum: Ruby Down Under. With your help, RubyDU will become our new home where we build our future over the next ten years.
With message history, proper threading and a wider audience, the Ruby Down Under forum is not a replacement to Ruby communities on Slack, but an addition to them. While the forum is supported by Ruby Australia, we welcome other Ruby communities, as the community is wider than any country’s borders.
Ruby Down Under is just a tool, available to everybody. Its full potential can only be realised by people like you. It’s there to help you meet new friends as well as learn and build amazing tools and products. A rock is just a rock – until you use it to bootstrap the stone age and the rest of the human civilisation.
So what’s coming in the next ten years? Nobody knows, but just like before, we will make history – that I know for sure.