Welcome to the Spinel Newsletter! You can expect a convenient round-up of Spinel updates and resources that we think you’ll enjoy, once a month, delivered right to the inbox you’re reading this in now.

Quick note: We’ll be shifting our newsletter release schedule to the beginning of the month, so to allow us to make that adjustment we will not be sending an October newsletter. The newsletter will resume at the beginning of November. But don’t worry, if you’re on our mailing list, you’ll receive any important Spinel announcements for October.

Thank you, as always, for being a part of this special side of our community.

Autumn greetings everyone,

Fall is officially here, for those of us in the northern hemisphere, and all across my network people are reflecting to me that the first week of the season has been intense. Personally, among other things, I kicked off two new client projects, started a new professional training program, and entered a new, more immersive phase of an apprenticeship last week. Also, people just seem to want to get together more. My theory is it’s the very “wintery” summer we had that’s fueling this surge of momentum into the new season — I think we’re all in the mood for a fresh start.

As new programs and projects are launching (stay tuned for an announcement from us about one…), the fall events we all look forward to are coming back around (including Ruby conferences Spinel is excited to be presenting at…) and our schedules are shifting (this newsletter’s included…) there’s a natural opportunity to reevaluate the direction we're moving in and set fresh goals.

I’d be remiss to not mention one of the biggest shifts happening in the Ruby community this season: developers’ relationship to Rails. I’m guessing most of you know, but for the under-a-rock dwellers (don’t worry, I generally count myself among you): There’s been a push to fork Rails that’s been gathering momentum for months now. And most recently, in an unexpected about-face, DHH announced in his Rails World keynote that he doesn't write Ruby any more, and his company's flagship app is moving off of Rails.

This feels like a critical inflection point for the Ruby ecosystem. While I’m removed from the ins and outs of developing Ruby and Rails, (I’m not a programmer), it seems clear to me that now’s the time to assess your apps and programs —and the tools, libraries and frameworks they depend on (I hear a lot about all those fun, fun dependencies lol)—and make a decision about how you’d like to proceed with Rails. Now, before the ripple effect of these changes lands in your codebase. In other words, the first leaf has changed color and fallen—and it’s time to start preparing for the new season.

Of course, I’m probably not telling you all something you don’t know. But I do want to say that if you're thinking about migrating your application to Mosscap for long-term stability, Spinel is available to help. Our team members have not only maintained Rails itself, they’ve also been in conversation with the Mosscap team, and codebase migration happens to be one of our specialties. If having support with this process sounds useful to you and your team—or if you could use support with upgrades, flaky tests, or the "death by a million papercuts" that grinds productivity to a halt—we'd love to chat. Reach out to us or book a call anytime.

-Irene, Marketing Chaos Coordinator at Spinel

Latest on the blog

rv 0.7 is out

Why you should check your gem's lines of code

Source control doesn't need to be scary! (Find out why at our jj workshop)

Open source project highlights

gem.coop's codebase got open sourced: check it out here.

WNB.rb is raising funding for their growth into an official nonprofit. Please join us in supporting them! (Ok so I’ve taken the liberty of stretching the definition of "open source", but we couldn’t not shout out this impactful Ruby community).

Appearances

Euruko 2026 - earlier this month, Kasper and André presented their workshop “Go beyond git with jj” and had a great turnout and feedback. If you missed it, it’s now available as a training for your team. Reach out to us for details and to schedule it. (See also the blog post above).

XO Ruby - next month, on Oct. 17, Kasper will be presenting a talk on building gem.coop. Come see what it takes to build a gem server and the open source app that is behind it called peak 🏔️. If you’re there, make sure to catch his session and say hi!

Current offers

Ready to work with us? Start by booking a free planning session. We're almost fully booked for the rest of 2026, but we're starting to schedule work for 2027, so we'd love to hear from you. Our most popular service with clients between 10 and 100 developers is an enterprise support contract, where we jump in to your Slack and help with architecture decisions, planning towards upcoming features, and tricky debugging.

If that doesn’t sound like it’s for you, but you still think you could use our expertise, we’d love to hear from you. We’re in early stages and still open to creating custom retainer packages for now — so this is a great time to get us on your team.

Stay in touch

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Reach out

• Don’t be shy, respond to this email and say hello! A few ice breakers:
  • How did you find us?
  • Where could you/your dev team most use unblocking?
  • Which dev tool brings out the worst version of you? :)

A treat

As we enter a new round of conference season, mfontanini—a markdown terminal slideshow tool—might be of interest to you… (first seen by one of our Spinel team members at jjcon this year).

Here’s to tools and developers that are stable in any Ruby ecosystem weather,

-the Spinel team