Reintroducing ourselves (tons of resources inside💎)

If that’s you, or you’re interested in learning about how we make that happen, you’re in the right place!


            
        July 13, 2026
    
    
Reintroducing ourselves (tons of resources inside💎)


        Hey there!
Now that we’re finally getting a second to slow down after a busy season of client work, I wanted to take a moment and give you a proper welcome to our email community.
So, welcome! I’m glad you’re here.
As a Ruby-forward, worker owned cooperative with a unique combination of specialities — there’s a lot to share about who we are and what we do. So to help us get acquainted (or re-acquainted) we’d love to introduce you to the team, and share some of our best pieces of content/work below.
Meet Spinel!
Spinel is a group of software developers and open source maintainers – including founders of the Rails and Bundler core teams – who have created a worker-owned cooperative. Our goal is to make it easier to be a software developer, especially if you use Ruby. Right now, we have two main approaches to that work: we build open source tools, and we make client teams more productive.
Our open source work is aimed at every Ruby developer, whether they are a student, a startup, or a Fortune 500 company. Our client work is especially valuable for companies between 50 and 500 engineers, where adding developers dedicated to productivity creates a multiplier for the productivity of every other developer at the company. If that’s you, or you’re interested in learning about how we make that happen, you’re in the right place!
André Arko Co-creator of the Ruby dependency manager Bundler in 2009. In addition to leading the team of maintainers working on Bundler and RubyGems.org from 2014 to 2025, he’s spent the last 15 years consulting on tools and processes to make software teams safer, faster, and more productive. He’s based in San Francisco and when he’s not programming he is probably looking for a new restaurant to try or a new book to read. Learn more. 
Kasper Timm Hansen Member of the Rails core team from 2016-2022. He’s the top 14th contributor and still pushes Rails forward with gems like Oaken, ActiveRecord::AssociatedObject, ActiveJob::Performs, and inventing the riffing technique to support Domain Modeling for Rails apps. He’s based in Copenhagen, Denmark and likes point and click video games. Learn more.
Sam Stephenson Veteran Rubyist, and member of the original Rails core team. He created Prototype.js, the Pow development server, and rbenv and ruby-build to manage Ruby versions, and invented the technology behind Turbo and Hotwire Native. He lives in Mexico City where he likes to feed the squirrels. Learn more.
David Rodríguez The number one contributor to Bundler & RubyGems, and primary maintainer from 2018 to 2025, he’s spearheaded fixes for longstanding bugs, migration to a state-of-the-art resolver, and efficient release cycles for more than a hundred versions. He also worked on the Dependabot system at GitHub, helping everyone keep their dependencies secure in dozens of languages. He lives in Madrid, where he is a proud carless but careful person. Learn more.
Here are a few things you might want to check out:  
Appearances and media features
New Rust-Based Tool Installs Ruby in Seconds The New Stack  
Seeds of Devastation (with Kasper Timm Hansen) Dead Code (podcast)
Rails on SQLite: exciting new ways to cause outages Friendly.rb 2025 (talk)
Social posts
We love when client work gives us the opportunity to release an open-source project.
rv buzz
Latest on the blog
Meet Spinel
rv 0.5: CLI tools + Windows
Announcing rv clean-install
Open source project highlights
Added Ruby 3.4.10 to rv: https://github.com/spinel-coop/rv-ruby/commit/3f4f4d4d2120a9225e5f1868e1d0b784eb3b3fc5
Fixed ruby-dev, the daily build of Ruby from git. Update by running rv ruby install dev each day to get the latest. https://github.com/spinel-coop/rv-ruby-dev/commit/24f03014a30493cd879768c5becc741947e776b0
Added a full set of policies to gem.coop, including terms of service, privacy policy, security policy, code of conduct, and DMCA notices https://gem.coop/policies/
Educational content
Get started learning about riffing, and Ruby and Rails tools with this practical collection of demos and tutorials on Kasper’s YouTube channel.  
Current offers  
Ready to work with us? Start by booking a free planning session. We’re already booked out until the end of summer, so if you know you want to work with us this year, don’t wait!
Our most popular service with clients between 10 and 100 developers is expertise on retainer, 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
Hear from us
You can expect a newsletter with 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.
We have a couple of social media pages which are mostly for reminding you when a new blog post drops. Follow us on BlueSky here and Mastodon here.
Share this with a friend
Did a friend or colleague immediately come to mind as you read this email? We’d love it if you forwarded this to them — word of mouth is our favorite way to grow our community.
Forwarded this email? Join our mailing list.
Reach out! Don’t be shy, respond to this email and say hello. Here are 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 a reward for reading all the way to the end, here’s a little treat (for jj lovers).

Here’s to reliable, useful and better software tools,
-André and the Spinel team
    

                                Don't miss what's next. Subscribe to Spinel Cooperative:
                            
                        
                    Email
                    *
                
                
                    Older →
                
                `rv` 0.5: CLI tools + Windows