# Timeline

The Ruby canon, in order. Every dated stop on the tour, oldest first.

1. February 24, 1993 [Ruby was named before it existed](https://chunkybacon.dev/stories/named-before-it-existed.md): The name came first, in a chat, before a single line of code.
2. December 21, 1995 [Ruby 0.95](https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/ruby-0-95.md): Ruby's first public release, shared to a Japanese newsgroup two days before Christmas 1995.
3. December 25, 1996 [Ruby 1.0](https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/ruby-1-0.md): Ruby's first public 1.0 release, delivered on Christmas Day.
4. 2000 [The Pickaxe](https://chunkybacon.dev/glossary/the-pickaxe.md): The nickname for the first big English Ruby book (there is a pickaxe on the cover).
5. August 4, 2003 [Ruby 1.8](https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/ruby-1-8.md): The long-lived, steady Ruby that carried the language through the early Rails years.
6. 2004 [Rails was pulled out of Basecamp](https://chunkybacon.dev/stories/rails-from-basecamp.md): Rails was never built as a product. It was extracted from a real app, then a screencast made it explode.
7. March 14, 2004 [RubyGems is born at RubyConf](https://chunkybacon.dev/stories/rubygems-at-rubyconf.md): The way Rubyists install libraries began as an all-night coding dare at RubyConf 2003.
8. December 25, 2007 [Ruby 1.9](https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/ruby-1-9.md): The Christmas-2007 modernization that gave Ruby a real virtual machine and a new way to handle text.
9. December 23, 2008 [The Merb and Rails merger](https://chunkybacon.dev/stories/merb-rails-merger.md): Two rival web frameworks stopped competing and decided to become one.
10. 2010 [Whyday](https://chunkybacon.dev/stories/whyday.md): Every August 19, Rubyists make something purely for the joy of it, in honor of _why.
11. August 29, 2010 [Bundler](https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/bundler.md): The tool that ended "dependency hell" by giving every machine the exact same set of gems.
12. February 24, 2013 [Ruby 2.0](https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/ruby-2-0.md): Ruby's 20th-birthday release, shipped on the exact day the name was chosen twenty years earlier.
13. February 19, 2014 [Jim Weirich's final commit](https://chunkybacon.dev/stories/jim-weirichs-final-commit.md): When a beloved teacher died, the community gathered on his last GitHub commit to say thank you.
14. April 23, 2014 [Is TDD Dead?](https://chunkybacon.dev/stories/is-tdd-dead.md): A blog post that started a fight, and a fight that stayed remarkably friendly.
15. December 25, 2020 [Ruby 3.0](https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/ruby-3-0.md): The "Ruby 3x3" promise, delivered on Christmas Day 2020.
16. December 25, 2021 [YJIT](https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/yjit.md): Shopify's just-in-time compiler for Ruby, merged in 3.1 and declared production-ready in 3.2.
17. December 25, 2025 [Ruby 4.0](https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/ruby-4-0.md): Ruby 4.0, delivered on Christmas Day 2025, introducing ZJIT and the experimental Ruby Box.

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Source: https://chunkybacon.dev/timeline/
License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)