Attending RailsConf 2024 was a perfect experience. While many have tried to announce the death of Ruby and/or Rails in recent years, I can’t help but feel they maybe weren’t relying on facts. Being a part of the community, the last couple of years have felt more like a resurgence of awareness and energy.

Or maybe it’s more akin to the tortoise and the hare where Ruby was slowly and steadily improving regardless of whether it was grabbing all the headlines. Compared to 2008, deploying and running Ruby feels incredible. There’s always room for improvement, but we’ve come a long ways. (And even better, it feels like the community enthusiasm for continuing to improve is higher than ever.)

Let me digress briefly to a personal anecdote…

In 2007, I had been doing a mix of front-end and back-end development for almost a decade, but ASP.Net was rapidly pushing me away from back-end development with its cavalier attitude towards creating horrendous front-end code. I had known about Ruby and Rails but never had a good context to try them out, but I figured “not giving up on back-end programming” was as good a reason as any.

Like many Ruby developers, I quickly felt the difference. At the time, I didn’t know which parts were Ruby and which were Rails, but it didn’t matter. I enjoyed it so much, it helped play a role in getting the courage to build and run a SaaS application for eight years as a sole founder.

It was the most significant career choice I’ve ever made. It’s not that it landed me a ridiculously overpaid job or anything like that, but it helped me enjoy my work more than I ever had.

Returning to current day, and I keep coming back to a simple thought that John Nunemaker shared. When he first started writing about Ruby and Rails, he registered AddictedToNew.com and wrote there for some time. He eventually registered AddictedToStable.com, and while he never carved out time to make the switch, that sentiment speaks volumes.

There’s a cycle to things, and humans tend to be more excited about shiny new things. Often, that shininess is a gimmick. Other times, it’s pulling on an extremely interesting thread that opens new doors. These days, it feels like the Ruby community is (somewhat) quietly taking care of business with no regard for popularity. How do we reconcile amazing progress with the larger developer community believing Ruby is boring at best or dying at worst. There’s a good possibility that we’re simply not sharing enough just how enjoyable it is to work with Ruby and how much it continues to rapidly improve.

No language or framework is perfect, and no single language or framework can be perfect for every single person. The Ruby community, however, sure feels like it could be perfect for so many people—not just the language but the people too. I’ve been to countless conferences focused on front-end development and design. They were all enjoyable and energizing in their own ways, but they didn’t feel like RailsConf 2024. In either set, there’s energy from like-minded people exploring and sharing, but this year’s RailsConf felt more like a warm embrace than just a friendly handshake.

Similarly, in conversations with junior developers, women, parents, others with disabilities, or any of the marginalized groups that don’t always feel welcome at technical conferences, hearing from individuals that they feel safe and welcome was deeply encouraging. (Even while it feels simultaneously disappointing that such a fact is special enough to be worth pointing out rather than being something we can all reasonably expect.)

RailsConf 2025 will be the last RailsConf, but in some ways, I’m even more excited as Ruby Central will be more able to focus on Ruby, the critical infrastructure we all rely on, and further expanding the community by supporting local meetups. No hype. No over-promising. Just doing the work to expand the community and make sure that working with Ruby continues to be enjoyable and pain-free.

For the briefest moment in time, it was personally a little unnerving to bet on Ruby as a solid long-term career choice. It wasn’t that it felt like Ruby was dying, but it certainly felt like it could limit my options as companies choose the newest and shiniest tech over time-tested and “boring” tech like Ruby. But in reality, plenty of companies and teams are continuing to go all-in on Ruby and Rails. Plenty are also finding that switching from shiny new stacks to Rails helps everything run more smoothly.

Ruby and Rails may not be regularly writing blog posts about the flashiest development news, but they’ve been improving in all of the ways that matter. Building with Ruby and Rails has always been enjoyable, but, in my very humble opinion, it’s never been this much fun with so little pain. Countless tasks that used to be less-than-enjoyable are now either incredibly straightforward or handled automatically without ever even having to think about it. It’s literally better than ever. Honestly, it’s now kind of starting to feel as if they’re just getting started.