At the end of RailsConf this year Jonan and Ruby Central launched the Ruby Central Membership Program for $25/month. Not only will I be happily paying that, but if they let me I fully intend to pay more, and this article explains my reasoning.

Shopify

The single biggest company contributor to Ruby with no close second, whether financially or through direct code investments, Shopify, is where we'll be starting.

To be clear I like the people there, I have many dear friends who work there, and I'm thrilled at what they're doing in the community to help grow Ruby. It is by no means intended as a disparagement of their efforts to say this:

This is the single biggest weakness of the Ruby community.

We have placed many of our hopes and dreams for growing the language and the community squarely on their shoulders, and should anything ever happen to Shopify the community would not survive as it does today.

Certainly they are not the only ones to financially and directly step up, but they are a significant portion of those efforts with several core contributors in both Ruby and Rails as well as a lion's share of funding.

Stepping Up

They can't do it alone, nor should they. While there are other companies which are involved they're becoming few and far between with dwindling contributions from companies that in the past would be actively invested.

Communities only grow when we all pitch in and share their burdens together. We cannot and must not take for granted all the work it takes to keep things running whether that be our conferences, meetups, ruby gems, infrastructure, or otherwise.

That doesn't have to be millions of dollars, no, it can start with even a hundred or two and grow from there. A community is not made by only large donors, but by everyone coming together for collective interests.

Giving Back

Ruby gave me a career, friends, community, financial security, and in many ways purpose. It would not be an exaggeration to say I am who I am today because of it, and to me that means investing back in the community.

Perhaps that's financial, but it doesn't have to be. Perhaps it's also community involvement, teaching, writing, contributing to common tooling, hiring new devs, or otherwise. I believe we have an obligation to give back, to send the ladder back down for the next generation, and invest in a future we'd like to see and build towards it together.

If you have the means I would encourage you to invest financially.

The Next Shopify

I want to see the next Shopify emerge, and another and another after that. I'm greedy, I want to see 10, 20, dare I say 50 companies contributing and investing to even half of what Shopify has done.

If one company can have such a substantial impact what can happen when the community and companies using Ruby and Rails join together?

Well that's what makes Ruby and Rails magic: our community, and we can invest in growing and cultivating that community.

Invest

This is my call to action for those reading:

Consider investing in Ruby Central. Consider investing in a future where Ruby grows and flourishes, where local meetups and conferences number so many that you can't possibly go to all of them in a year, where we can onboard junior engineers faster than bootcamps and colleges can graduate them, and where we see this language that gave us everything flourish.

We need everyone, and everyone starts with each one of us. Together we can do amazing things.

You can start a membership on the top-right of the page via "Sign In" or "Sign Up" and selecting a professional membership.