Stories

The moments and turning points that shaped Ruby's history.

• Is TDD Dead?

  A blog post that started a fight, and a fight that stayed remarkably friendly.

• Jim Weirich's final commit

  When a beloved teacher died, the community gathered on his last GitHub commit to say thank you.

• Rails was pulled out of Basecamp

  Rails was never built as a product. It was extracted from a real app, then a screencast made it explode.

• Ruby was named before it existed

  The name came first, in a chat, before a single line of code.

• RubyGems is born at RubyConf

  The way Rubyists install libraries began as an all-night coding dare at RubyConf 2003.

• The Christmas-release tradition

  Ruby gives itself to the community as a present, almost every December 25.

• The Merb and Rails merger

  Two rival web frameworks stopped competing and decided to become one.

• Whyday

  Every August 19, Rubyists make something purely for the joy of it, in honor of _why.