Who’d have thought? In case you didn’t know the two powerhouses in Ruby Frameworks are going to start working together to make the world a better place. This brings up a lot of emotions for me and gives me hope for the community.
4 years ago I spent my christmas holidays rewriting my php based weblog in rails, this new and crazy framework where you wrote less and did more. At the time I was a Solaris administrator in Georgia and the programming job landscape was primarily Java, C#, and PHP. I didn’t really want to write in those languages so I stuck to something I did enjoy, UNIX. Over that holiday season though, I really fell for the Ruby language. Not just the language but the community that surrounded rails at this time was nothing short of magical. This was my first introduction to entrepreneurs in the web space and it seemed like every new person I met in this community was just awesome at life(and hacking).
So rails took off and a lot of us got busy. A lot of us wrote software that never saw the light of day, others wrote stuff that made the world take rails seriously. I was lucky enough to be the first technical hire at Engine Yard and the growth that we’ve seen is inspirational. Not only did we target the “premium rails hosting” market and excel at meeting and exceeding our customer’s expectations but we made it clear that we love the Ruby community. We hired Evan Phoenix and Yehuda Katz to push the ruby interpreter and the merb framework respectively despite the fact that there was no immediate financial benefit.
So I’m sitting here avoiding work by writing this blog post, but I’m just so freaking excited by this merge. I’m delighted to know that our community can still surprise me, that folks can work together, and the future of ruby in the websphere is looking good.
Much respect to the merb and rails teams for making this happen. Thanks, a lot.