An Introduction to Your RUBY3.dev Host
First off, I want to apologize. Somehow I missed sending out an email about our most recent article: Ruby on the Frontend? Choose Your Weapon — all about Ruby2JS and Opal. Silly me!
Secondly, I'm taking a short break from weekly posting and plan to resume right after the holidays. Nevertheless, vital work continues! Ruby 3 itself is nearly ready for release, and thus I've been testing out the latest preview and putting it through its paces. Expect much useful educational material to arise out of these tests in January 2021 and beyond.
Get to Know Your Host
I (Jared) have been a Rubyist for over 10 years now. I started out in 2008 having previously been a PHP (and sometimes Python) web developer. Not PHP in the "customize WordPress" sense (although I did do that too!), but in the "write a custom framework that competes with the new-hotness Ruby on Rails" sense. 😄
When it became clear to me my homegrown PHP framework could never meaningfully compete with Rails (or the other top PHP frameworks sprouting up at the time), I decided to bite the bullet and learn Ruby. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Ruby seemed strage and unfamilar at first. No C-style curly braces anywhere? items.each do |item| instead of foreach ($items as $item)? def … end all over the place? But once I got over my initial hangups over syntax, I came to discover that the reason Rails was so cool and minimalist was no accident. It was cool because Ruby itself enabled all the coolness. And thus the unfolding of a decade-long love affair with this delightful and, yes, magical programming language.
Ruby provided me with a clear path towards profitibility and sustainability for my fledgling freelance web studio. Even if I now write a lot more JavaScript in my "day job" than I'd care to admit, Ruby is still the backbone of my career. And that's even truer now that I've become a maintainer for some groovy Ruby open source projects! In summary:
Bridgetown is a Ruby-powered static site generator and a “fast, scalable, modular, and thoroughly forward-looking framework for building websites and frontend applications”. We have an awesome Discord chat where folks help each other out while building websites and improving our Ruby & web design skills. I'm so grateful for this fledgling community.
Ruby2JS is profiled in the frontend article above. It's a way to write modern ES6+, bundler-friendly JavaScript using Ruby syntax/semantics. I started contributing a couple months ago and now use it extensively on a number of projects. It's pretty nifty already and only getting better at a fairly rapid pace.
I'm also thankful to have had the opportunity to contribute to a few other well-known projects such as GitHub's ViewComponent, StimulusReflex, and Erubi over the past year. After a long, long time of feeling nervous and inadequate (imposter syndrome!) to contribute to high-profile open source projects, it turns out it's not so bad after all. 😉
And now it's your turn!
My top goal in starting the RUBY3.dev blog was to help other people discover the joys of Ruby programming and open source collaboration that has been such an important part of my own life and career. With luck, my ceiling can become your floor, and you'll accomplish even greater things as a developer.
So thank you once again for becoming a subscriber, and at any point if you have questions about the topics on the blog or anything else I discuss in this newsletter, please don't hesitate to email me.
Catch you on the flip side!
Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas!
Jared