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All right, I am incredibly happy to be here.
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It’s the 20th anniversary of Ruby on Rails. It is an amazing achievement to survive 20 years in technology with a framework or a library.
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Making it to 20 years is almost unbelievable. Not just to reach 20 years, but to be here, 20 years in, and to be this fired up, this excited, and this motivated to continue improving the framework and the ecosystem.
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It is just an absolute honor. Hence, it’s incredibly flattering that we have Rails World, the first event of a brand new foundation, happening this year.
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I started back in 2003 working on Ruby on Rails and have not stopped. This year, in the 20th anniversary, it’s wonderful to announce that we will be pushing Rails 7.1 as another major release of the framework packed full of exciting new features.
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Raphael is our release manager, and he has done an excellent job getting everything ready. The last major release of Ruby on Rails was Rails 7.0, which was almost two years ago.
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Since then, around 700 people in this room have made code contributions to the release, and about 4,000 commits have gone into the framework since that last release.
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It’s a pleasure to see all of this, and it’s one of those gifts that I think this community is really all about.
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I like to look at the Rails community and the ecosystem as a gift-swapping environment. We are here to make gifts for ourselves and share them with everyone else. You bring a gift, I bring a gift, and together we have a whole stack of gifts.
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This realization reflects the ethos of the MIT license—we are not here in a transactional way. I am building something for you, and then you have to give me an equal part back. No, we are here to give each other gifts with no strings attached because we simply enjoy making gifts.
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I enjoy making these gifts, I enjoy making them for myself, and I really enjoy sharing them and seeing all the gifts that come back. Some of those gifts are code.
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As I said, we have 700 people who have contributed to the latest version of Rails, and almost 7,000 people have contributed to Rails over the 20 years we've been tracking contributions.
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This is truly astounding—not just that we have so many people contributing, but that many continue to contribute, with new people coming in all the time.
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I know there are a lot of attendees here for whom Rails World is their first Rails event. This is a key part of why we are putting on these events, to welcome new people into the ecosystem and get them involved in this gift-sharing ceremony.
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While a lot of these gifts are indeed code—and code is important, it’s foundational—it certainly isn’t everything. You can have the best code in the world, but if it’s not wrapped in understandable documentation and clear marketing, no one is going to care.
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The magic of the Ruby and Rails community is understanding that while code is essential, there is so much more to it. One of the most important gifts we’ve been able to give ourselves is the foundation for new institutions.
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When you've been around for 20 years, a lot of stuff accumulates. Sometimes you have to take a brand new sheet of paper and think, 'With everything I know now, what would I do?' One of the most rewarding things I’ve been involved in over the past year or so has been the Rails Foundation, setting that up.
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We knew we probably should have had this for a long time, but now we do. I want to thank the people and companies who, when I reached out with just an idea of forming this Foundation, were eager and willing to help us.
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I first reached out to Tobi from Shopify about just under a year ago with this idea of creating a Foundation and setting up a new institution for creating events like this. He was on board right away.
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These companies signed up shortly thereafter: CookB, Fly.io, GitHub, Intercom, Procore, Shopify, and my own company, 37signals. If not for them, we wouldn’t be here today.
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These were the eight companies that kicked in a million dollars to get us started, to have a treasure chest to book events like this before we even had anyone showing up to pay for tickets.
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Since then, we’ve added a whole slew of contributing members, including AppSignal, who is also the lead sponsor of this conference, and is an application we now use at 37signals to track our performance.
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We have BigBinary, Cedar, Code Planet, and Argun Andu. It’s incredible to have this kind of support this long into it, to have people willing to invest not just their time but also their money into facilitating something like this.
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But even with all of that, none of it would have come to fruition, and I wouldn’t be on this stage if it hadn’t been for the Executive Director, Amanda Perino. I just want to give her a huge round of applause.
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It’s such a strange concept to wrap your head around. I am 44 years old, which means I’ve spent about half my life working on this framework and half my life being involved with creating Ruby on Rails from a technology and ecosystem perspective.
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That’s sometimes hard to contextualize. One way I try to make sense of time is to look at the past. We are as far away from the inception of Ruby on Rails in 2003 as we are from 1983.
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This is me in 1983, the year that the modern internet really got started with ARPANET converting to TCP/IP—the year that the first home Nintendo system was released—and one year before the first computer I experienced, the Commodore 64, was released.
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That was a long time ago and feels like a completely different era, which reminds me of just how young this industry is. We are basically the same distance from the creation of Ruby on Rails as many people are from their first computer.
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When these things came out with one megahertz cpu, if we jump to 2003, this might actually be 2004. This was my home office in Copenhagen where I worked on Ruby on Rails before moving to the United States.
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These milestones remind me that we’ve come a long way, but also that a lot of things are the same. If you look at the applications on my screen now, you could squint and see applications that look exactly like those on my screen today.
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We’ve got text editors, our terminals, and while we’re not using Track anymore, we’re using GitHub. A lot of things have changed, but a lot of things have remained the same.
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We can get nostalgic easily. We could spend an entire keynote sharing funny anecdotes from 20 years in this community, developing it. But I think we’re going to have plenty of time to look back.
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Far sooner than we’re ready—perhaps after AI puts us all out of work or destroys the world, whichever comes first.
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What I’m interested in is looking forward, and that’s what this morning’s keynote will mostly focus on: all the things we’re doing, all the things we’re building. There is so much.
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Perhaps this is the most packed time I’ve been involved with in terms of the new frameworks and libraries that I’ve seen grow and that we’ve planted recently. It’s an exciting time.
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I was going to ask AI to suggest what we should do about this phenomenon that is coming in. I’m sure all of you have had fun playing with AI, and maybe some of you are ambivalent about what this new world is going to be.
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I thought this cliché Chinese expression for crisis, meaning danger but also opportunity, might represent it quite well. AI is both threatening and exciting.
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It probably would have stated it confidently because that is what AI does. It dreams and thinks. The second character doesn’t mean opportunity; it means change point. However, it’s been adopted by speakers and business people for a long time.
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What we get back from AI reflects what we put in. Therefore, we need to give our best: the best we have of humanity, the best ideas of development, to get something great back.
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I think this is what’s exciting about this moment. Now, I believe that it is one of the opportunities we have that in 20 years of developing Ruby on Rails, we’ve gone through at least two and a half major crises in the industry. We are in one right now.
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The 5.5% is the American Federal Reserve fund rate, which is the main interest rate governing things in the US. It is still heading up, and we are in this weird economic space where things are going.
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Even if it’s painful, I think that some compression, some pressure, can cause us to rise to the moment and realize what’s important—the things we’re actually good at—and compel us to improve.
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If I look back over the last decade-plus of the tech industry, you can sort of map it to this graph of long-term rates from the Federal Reserve fund rate. Around 2009, the rate went to zero and stayed there for the next six years.
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In my opinion, this is what gave rise to a sort of sloth and indifference to productivity—an indifference to how capable individual programmers needed to be.
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I think we’re rediscovering now, as rates go back up and the price of innovation becomes more significant, that this wasn’t a good place to be.
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We need pressures from the economy, from startups, and from each other to stay productive. This was the original pitch of Ruby on Rails: that we had to be productive.
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If you examine some of the things that were released during that era, it's not a mystery that we continuously got tools that enabled us to create slightly better versions of the same thing, but required far more effort.
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This wasn’t a good direction; this setup represented a low productivity tolerance, which was a zero-interest phenomenon, and I’m glad we’re going to move past it.
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The phase from 2009 onwards was a kind of productivity dark ages. Yes, we were able to produce slightly more grain, but we were using primitive tools that required a lot of labor.
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My formative experience with Rails and Ruby was building Basecamp. We built Basecamp in about six months with one developer and two part-time designers, and it became a wonderful business.
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That business has yielded hundreds of millions of dollars over the years. If we could do that in 2003-2004, we should be able to do so much more in 2023.
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Yet, when I speak to startups and companies, and I hear about team sizes and specialization, it’s the opposite: it takes longer to create marginally different features, and that’s not a good place to be.
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I believe this syndrome, these dark ages, were in part ushered in by companies that had early success, realizing they needed something different and more.
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In many cases, that second round of ideas just wasn’t as good or didn’t apply to as many people in various circumstances. There was a discussion on Twitter recently about Twitter and the fact that it moved off Rails.
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I was always curious about that story—here's a testimony from someone who actually worked at Twitter when they moved off. They moved off because they had a poorly designed Rails app.
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That happens. Then they transitioned into what they thought was better: a constellation of Java microservices. For ten years, nothing happened.
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They ended up pouring concrete over the application and hiring thousands of people but made no progress at all. Twitter, in many ways, exemplifies what can happen during these dark ages.
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We think we’re making progress when, in reality, the incremental yield is so small. The same trend occurred at Airbnb, and these trends could be shown next to JavaScript frameworks.
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But what is going to happen now is that the pendulum is swinging back because it has to. The forces of the economy will compel us to swing back. We will move away from this focus on part-stack developers.
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We shouldn’t be aiming for smaller niches and ever more specialized tasks. We should design, install, and maintain everything, and we should be capable of doing all of these things ourselves.
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There’s a funny anecdote in the Elon Musk biography about how the solar business struggled because designers weren't present when installations were happening, leading to inefficiencies.
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This divides designers from implementers and creates inefficiencies. It codifies the split between part-stack developers and the holistic view we cherish in the Rails community.
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Unless you are both designing and implementing, feeling the pressures of all the little bolts, you’re going to create something cumbersome. One of my favorite articles ever in the development world is Joel Spolsky’s 2001 piece, 'Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You.'
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It encapsulates the essence of this sentiment: architects work to solve problems they think they can solve, not problems that are useful. Tell me something new that I couldn’t do before.
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Instead, these 'astronauts' often float out of touch with reality and waste our time. This reflects the last decade in tech—we need real progress.
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What new things can we achieve in the last 10-15 years? We should embrace what is new, but also acknowledge that there has been much 'roundness' that has only resulted in spinning us in circles.
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The ideal I look towards is Leonardo da Vinci from the 1500s. He painted the Mona Lisa but also explored the specific gravity of solids and developed ball bearings.
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He embodied the merger of art and engineering, which should be our aim as developers. We should appreciate and embrace what Ruby provides, both in terms of the beauty of the language and productivity.
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We are not just engineers; we are writers, artists, and, yes, code poets.
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This duality enriches our work, allowing us to find joy in both creation and comprehension. We should aim to be more than just full-stack developers.
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Maybe the term 'full-stack developer' has aged out a bit. Instead, we should be Renaissance developers—interested in all aspects of design, implementation, maintenance, and deployment.
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That’s what is so wonderful about the Rails community: we tirelessly work to lower the barriers for new people to come in, enabling them to experience success.
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We want them to see a Hello World example without hassle, while also providing a decade-long journey for them to learn, explore, and discover more.
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There’s no division between who creates the framework and who uses it. Ruby is this magical environment where, at any time, if you wonder how something works, you can dive into the source and see what's happening.
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You could look at a Ruby method while understanding its context. This leads to the idea of progress being good—it has been good.
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I’m not saying that the height of all web development was in 2005. Absolutely not; we have developed a collection of great tools during this time.
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However, we've done so on a bridge of complexity—trapped in complexity, wrapped in complexity. It doesn’t need to be that way.
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Progress is not synonymous with complexity. Complexity is a bridge we use to get to simplicity. I believe this is what makes this moment so exciting.
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There have been significant core developments that allow us to see the destination clearly now. We can recognize that this was arduous, but it's getting easier.
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So, I’m going to talk about seven frameworks and libraries that have either recently been announced or will soon be released in the next 37 minutes.
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This will be a tasting menu, not a deep dive into every single framework. A lot of this conference is packed with sessions dedicated to those frameworks.
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But there are three bridges that I think have been traversed with varying degrees of complexity over the past 10-15 years, and we're now seeing a destination of simplicity that looks incredibly appealing.
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Let’s start with the front end. The front end has experienced the most churn, the most change, both positively and negatively in terms of expectations for the kind of applications we make for the web today.
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There has been a constant strain to keep up with that change, and some of that blame does fall on Rails because we have tried to adapt. We weren’t content to sit by and wait; we had to be part of the mix.
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In 2019, we added Webpacker by default to the Rails stack, which was perhaps one of the few times we added a major new framework to Rails, knowing: 'I hope this doesn’t last.'
