Blastoff Rails 2026 - We Are the Ruby Community by Andrew Mason

5, 4, 3, 2, 1. We have lift off. >> Uh this is our final talk of the day. And uh uh I think it's a I think it's a really good good uh cap to this event that we're doing. Um Andrew uh came to me uh last minute. Not saying that's part of his personality or not, maybe. Uh but uh >> You're not supposed to say yes. >> [laughter] >> He came to me hoping that I uh would not uh pick his talk, but uh I think he probably I think he I think you uh you told somebody that you were going to submit a CFP. And then uh you accidentally got into the conference. So, then he had now he has to give the talk, but uh I'm very uh thankful that he that he chose Blast Off to submit that to because uh he's going to be talking about the Ruby community and like I kind of talked about in the opening, uh I am a a big big believer in participating in the community, especially in person. And uh I think Andrew does that pretty well. I see him at a lot of conferences, and of course uh if you don't know, he is on the Remote Ruby Podcast. And uh yeah, so I'm really excited for this talk. I think it's a great cap to these two days, and let's go ahead and give our final Blast Off introduction to Andrew in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Blast Off. >> [applause] >> Uh before we kind of get into this, putting on a conference is not easy, especially for your first time. And this conference has been amazing for me. I'm sure it has been for all of you. The talks have been great, speakers have been great, the environment has been great. So, I want all of us to give a huge round of applause for Travis. >> [applause] [applause] >> All right, before I introduce myself, I want to do something. It's the end of the day, it's Friday. Uh I'm going to read a list. The moment you hear something that's true for you, stand up. If you're not able to stand up, you can raise your hand. Um but I want to get a little interactive here. So, have you ever contributed to Rails? Created or contributed to a Ruby gem? Written a blog post about Ruby? Stay standing. Answered another developer's question online? Listened to a Ruby podcast? Used Ruby at work or for fun? Showed up to a Ruby event or conference like this one? >> [laughter] >> All right, good. Everyone standing. >> [applause] >> Yeah. I mean, everyone in this room was on their feet. You know, the the this next one, I want you to kind of think in your mind and just kind of hold on to it. Just don't move a muscle, just answer in your head. Have you ever felt, even as you sit here right now, that you're not really part of the Ruby community? Cuz I have. A lot of us experience Ruby this way. We attend the events, we use the gems, we follow the discussions, and the community itself somehow feels like something happening somewhere else. Run by people more experienced, more visible, more important than us. So, I want to tell you the simplest, strangest thing that I've learned about this. Every one of you just got to your feet and raise your hand, that was the community in motion in this room. Some of you stood for answered a question online. That's not the community's audience, that's the community doing its job. The reading, the listening, the asking, the showing up, you've been doing it the whole time, you just didn't know it counted. By the end of this talk, I want you to that to feel obvious. So, let me start where I started, completely convinced it wasn't true. I've spent a lot of years at conferences like this one and an embarrassingly long amount of time behind a podcast microphone. These days I co-host a show called Remote Ruby with Chris Oliver and David Hill and formerly with Jason Charnes. And that points at the most important thing I've learned in all those years and all those hours. It's not technical, it's this. For years, I thought the Ruby community was somewhere else. A room I hadn't been invited to yet. Um some something I needed a pass to get into. But when I look back now, I don't see a group, I see people. Chris, Jason, co-workers, maintainers, conference attendees, friends. The friendships came first, community was just the word I used for them afterwards. And all of it started because of a decision I made when I was brand new to Ruby. Uh one more introduction uh because I really owe them one. By day I work at Podia. Uh Podia is a home for the courses you teach, the community you host, the emails you write, and the people you do it all for. And they are the reason I get to be standing up here in front of all of you. They sent me, they covered the trip, they encouraged me. They believe that communities matter. So, before I go any further, thank you a lot to Podia. >> [applause] >> Most of us picture a technical community as a pyramid. And because I'm not really great at Keynote, I couldn't make a pyramid, but um I used to picture it this way. At the top, we had the Ruby core team, the Rails maintainers, conference speakers, the gem authors, the podcasters, the writers, and then everyone else, like me. Just writing Ruby at work, reading the blog posts, listening to the podcast, watching the talks. I never thought I was outside of Ruby. I just felt kind of adjacent to it. Standing near the doorway, hoping that nobody noticed I felt like I didn't quite belong inside. A lot of Rubyists feel the exact same way. Maybe some of you in this room feel that way. But communities aren't really pyramids, even when they look like ones from the outside. You see the speakers and the maintainers because they're visible. What you have to look harder to see is the thing actually holding the whole thing together. It isn't a hierarchy. What you have to look harder to see is the thing actually holding the whole thing together. It's all of these things. Someone asking a question. Someone answering it. Someone fixing a typo in the docs. Someone helping a newcomer at a meet-up. Someone inviting someone to join them at lunch. Someone simply showing up. The visible parts of the ecosystem get the attention. The conversations and relationships are what keep it alive. So, how do you go from being an outsider to feeling like you belong? You participate. It sounds like insultingly simple, but every community I've ever belonged to came down to that one move. I stopped only consuming what other people made, and I started contributing something back. However small it was. That gem that you bundled installed this morning, somebody wrote it. Somebody else filed an issue that made it better. Somebody posted it on social media. Somebody else wrote the tutorial that helped others understand it. The community isn't behind the tool. It is every person who chose to engage with the tool instead of only using it. And participation comes in hundreds of shapes. Asking a question, answering one, filing a bug report, writing a blog post, saying thank you, showing up to a meet up or a conference, making a friend, or becoming one. The form barely matters, but the choice does. Because once you participated even once, you have skin in the game. You care about the next release because you filed an issue against the last one. You've read the RFC because you commented on the draft. And you show up to the meet up because last time you actually talked to someone there. One act of participation turns a language into a place. And that place has no door, no gate, no moment where someone hands you a badge and says, "You belong now." The community isn't a destination. It's a pile of friendships that accumulated one hello at a time. Until one day you look up and the room is full of people who know your name. People who are excited to see you or talk to you. And I know that's true because it's the only reason I'm standing up here. And let me tell you how I know. Rewind about 9 years ago, which feels like a lifetime. Uh Uh, I was a junior developer, fresh out of college. I knew exactly three Rubius in the entire world and I shared an office with all three of them. There's no Ruby meetup in my city. Nobody I went to school with wrote it. Uh, as far as my actual physical life was concerned, the Ruby community didn't exist. But every podcast I put in my ears, every conference talk I watched, it kept telling me this one thing. There's this warm, generous, welcoming, world-famous Ruby community out there and I kept thinking, where? Where is this magic community that everyone keeps talking about? Because I haven't seen it. So, one day I decided to go out and find it. Uh, there was a show a long time ago called the Ruby Testing Podcast hosted by developer named Jason Sweat and I sent him a message and it basically said, "Hey, could I just come on and ask you questions about testing, uh, from a junior's perspective because I have a lot of them. A lot of them and I still do. And I want to be honest about that moment cuz it's kind of the whole point. I typed that message. I deleted it. I rewrote it. I rewrote it again. My thumb hovered over the send button. And for an embarrassingly long time, every voice in my head said, "Who do you think you are?" And then I sent it anyway. And to my complete surprise, he said yes. I recorded my first podcast episode. I was terrified. I was sure I'd ask something so obliviously dumb, obviously dumb, that the entire internet would point and laugh, that my co-workers would figure out I'm an impostor, uh, and no one would accept me. And then the episode came out and something shifted. I wasn't it wasn't that I'd become important. I hadn't. It was that for the first time I'd done something for the Ruby community instead of only taking from it. That was the bridge. I'd walked across it without even realizing it. And that counted. That first episode wasn't the only time showing up changed everything for me. Uh while later I went to my first big Ruby conference. I barely knew a single soul and I spent most of the time feeling like I'd kind of snuck in. And then someone posted on conference Slack, Chris Oliver who some of you may know. He said he had stickers. He was sitting at a table upstairs if anyone wanted one. And I almost didn't go. I was shy. I was nervous. I felt completely out of place. But I went. There were a few developers gathered around some tables. Some now very famous in the community, some who already were. Chris was one of them. Sitting near him was a guy named Jason Charnes. I grabbed a sticker. I sat down. And that was kind of the whole story. I grabbed a sticker. Sat down. Barely said a word. Just listened. I had no idea at the time that sitting down at that table would really change my life. That Chris and Jason would eventually invite me to become a co-host on Remote Ruby with them. That Jason would end up recruiting me to come work with him at Podia. That I would go to their baby showers, meet their families, and travel the world with them. All of it started because I worked up the nerve to walk over and take a sticker. Most times I've shown up of course it hasn't changed my life so drastically. Some conversations turned into friendships. Some stayed acquaintances. Some were a single chat that I never repeated. And some and for that just completely fine. Each one was just me choosing to show up. And the more I showed up, the more people I met, the more involved I got, the more I felt like I had truly found my place in the community. And I do want to be careful here. Because it would be easy to hear this story wrong. I'm not telling you the goal is to end up on a stage like this. Please don't walk out of here thinking you need to host a podcast or give a talk or get famous to belong. I think about the Rubies who have quietly answered beginner questions up on Stack Overflow for years, who've never given a talk, never shipped a gem you've heard of, only interacting with their co-workers. And who are every bit as much of the Ruby community as anyone you'll see on this stage. Staying small is enough, and staying small might be the whole point. The path from I don't know a single person in Ruby to I have found my people had almost nothing to do with becoming a better engineer. It had everything to do with showing up one small contribution at a time. The thing I was actually good at was asking questions out loud in public where other Rubies could hear them. And that turned out to be my contribution. I didn't find my people by being the smartest person in the room because frankly, I'm not. I found them by being curious enough to participate before I felt qualified to. So, if the community is just people connected by a shared tool, why do so many of us still feel like outsiders? Some of the reasons are real and I'm not going to just wave them away. Geography is real. There are whole countries that have no local Ruby scene at all. Time is real. Some of you are holding down a job and a family and have about 20 minutes maximum to spare a week. And money is real. You may not have the means to go to conferences or meetups. And bad experiences are real. Maybe you asked a question once and got talked down to. I know I have. Maybe you showed up somewhere nobody made room for you. Maybe you posted into a channel and got nothing but silence back. If that's you, I want to be as clear as I can be. That was not you failing to belong. That was the community failing you. And hold on to that because in a few minutes I'm going to tell you whose job it is to fix that. But there's another kind of barrier, and this is the one I want to spend time on because it's the one almost nobody talks about. It isn't out in the world at all. It's in here. You've probably thought some version of these and I want to say them out loud because once you say them out loud, it kind of takes the power away. You've probably thought some version of these. I'm not experienced enough. I don't know Ruby well enough. Someone smarter than me is obviously already said this. My question's probably dumb. What if I post and nobody replies? What if I waste the maintainers' time? And what if they reject me? Here's what I've learned about those thoughts. They show up in the beginner who just started learning Ruby. They show up in the developer who's written Ruby for 10 years and never participates in public. They show up in the veterans, the people who used to be everywhere and quietly drifted away. They still show up in me. I had a version of that voice in my head this morning before this talk. It doesn't fully go away. You just stop letting it make the decision for you. And here's the irony that took me far too long to realize. The culture of Ruby is specifically built to dissolve those fears. Matz designed Ruby to make programmers happy. And that didn't just shape the language, it shaped the culture around the language. Kindness, curiosity, mentorship, sharing what you know. Matz is nice, so we are nice. The culture wasn't handed down from the famous maintainers. It was built by thousands of ordinary developers being generous to one one another. One conversation at a time, one line of code at a time, one thumbs up on GitHub at a time. People exactly like you. But I want to be honest, the culture is something we aim for. It's not automatic. Ruby has had its bad days and its unkind rooms. This year in particular has been really challenging for the community and at times it felt like we had really fractured. And that's the uncomfortable other side we are the community. If we really are it, then the times it was generous are on us, and the times it was cruel are on us, too. Which means the fix is ours. Most of us consume the Ruby community without ever realizing we're allowed to participate in it. Uh we read the blog posts, watch the conference talks, use the gems, scroll through GitHub. Participation looks almost identical. It just adds one ingredient, interaction. Asking the question instead of only reading the answers. Thanking the maintainer instead of only bundle installing their gem. Replying to the post instead of only scrolling through it. Showing up to the meet up instead of only seeing the announcement. You don't need authority. You don't need expertise. You just need the interaction. And the majority of this isn't loud or viral. It's small. A reply, question, thank you, bug report. The accumulation is what builds the community. One of my personal favorite ways to interact is thanking a gem maintainer. When you thank a gem maintainer, you're not just being polite, you're expressing gratitude for work that is thankless, lonely, and the kind of work that people quietly burn out doing. And the thank you can be the first rung on the ladder. The next rung up is taking a little weight off of them. Reproducing a bug so that they don't have to. Fixing a confusing line in the read me. Answering someone else's questions in the issues so the maintainer doesn't have to. Writing a tutorial to help others use it. You don't have to be an expert to do any of those things. You just have to try. When you ask questions in a Discord server or a Slack channel, you're not just solving your problem, you're adding to the record of how Ruby is used. When you reply to another Rubius online, you're not just commenting, you're contributing to the conversation that is the community. Most of the lasting relationships in this ecosystem started as a comment, reply, question. And what does this lead to? Friendships, mentorships, collaborations, jobs, for me co-hosts. So, if you want a first step, a real one that you can take tonight, uh here it is. Find a gem that you've used this year, one that you would genuinely miss if it went away, and send them a maintainer short message, an email, GitHub issue, post on whatever social media platform they're on. Something that just says, "Hey, I use your gem at work or in my personal life, and it's made my life easier. Thank you." That's the whole assignment. You haven't fixed a bug, you haven't shipped a PR, you've put something into the ecosystem though instead of taking away from it. And here's the part I want you most to hear. Maybe you'll get a warm reply. Maybe you'll get nothing back at all. Send it anyway. Because the part that mattered already happened the moment you hit send. If silence comes back, that's not a verdict on you. It's just silence. Try another door. There's lots of doors. And if you've been around Ruby for a while, then this is where I keep my promise from earlier. Remember the silence, the question that gets no answer? You, all of you in this room, are the fix for that. You might be the person someone in this room is too nervous to walk up to. You might be the person who makes them feel comfortable after asking a question that they felt might be dumb. You might be the reply that makes this entire community feel real for someone who is new for the very first time. The way Jason Sweat was for me. Participation doesn't have to mean standing in a room. For a lot of us, online is the community. The parents, the people in time zones with their local scene, anyone whose energy is already spoken for. For us, it isn't a consolation prize. it's the real thing. Discord, Slack, posting wherever Rubies gather near you, a monthly video call with one developer on the other side of the world talking about what each of you are building. And if you do want to meet up in person, look for local meetups. meetup.com is one place to start. You can go to rubyevents.org. Or something that I did, find a Ruby shop in your area. See if you can find any of their employees online. And see if any of them would be down to get lunch. If there's nothing near you, you can start something. But don't hear that as now I have to go organize a conference like Travis. It can be two people in a coffee shop. It can be you and one person who replied to your social post online. Communities don't start with big events. They start with two people who decide to show up for each other. When I started, a lot of the well-known Rubies in the community were moving on. Some to React, some to Elixir. And I'll be honest, I was pretty scared. I wondered who was going to fill the void that they left in this wonderful language that I had just discovered and just started getting into. But communities change. People move on. That's normal. That's healthy. And here's what happened. New people showed up. The ones who left weren't replaced. They inspired. Without ever planning to, I helped fill a little of that void myself. Just by showing up and making friends along the way. That's how communities survive. And it matters even more right now because we're in a genuinely strange moment for software. AI can write Ruby. Like really write it. It'll explain the syntax, generate the test, refactor your controller, recommend a gem, build a whole product. The tools are getting cheaper, the knowledge is getting cheaper. And let me name a fear that some of you in this room might have because I feel it in me. If the machine can do the part that I'm proud of, what is left for me? Here's what's left. Here's the part that doesn't get cheaper. The community. An AI can hand you the language, it can't be the community around it. It can't run the meet up where you meet the person who becomes your friend. It can't be the friend who texts you, "Did you see the new Rails release?" 30 seconds after it drops. AI can produce Ruby code, only we can produce the Ruby community. The tools change, they always have. The community is the constant. When the code gets automated, the people become the entire reason a language is worth using at all. And because the people are what continue to push it forward. And if you're just starting out, that might be the best news in this whole talk. The part that's hardest automate isn't your code, it's you, the person other people want to build with. You can start being that today, long before you feel good enough. Languages and communities, they they need each other. The language gives the community something to gather around. The community keeps the language alive by teaching it, defending it, evolving it, and making it feel like a home. Ruby is alive because we are all here. Because people like Travis are brave enough to start a conference. Because other of us are brave enough to start a gem. And the next junior developer who's nervous, who walks into this ecosystem, the one who can't find the magical Ruby community that everyone keeps talking about, they might stay because somebody in this room chose to show up for them. Next time you catch yourself thinking, "I'm not really part of the Ruby community." I want you to do one thing. Look around this room. cuz I'm doing it right now. And I see people who answered the questions I was too embarrassed to ask. People whose blog posts I learn from. People I met because one of us was brave enough to say hello. People who I've shared meals with. People who I've traveled the world with. The Ruby community isn't somewhere else. It was never somewhere else. It was sitting in this room the whole time. So remember what I told you at the very top? You don't join the Ruby community. You are the Ruby community. The people sitting next to you right now, they're not gatekeepers. They're the ones who chose to show up. Just like Jason Sweat did when he said yes to a terrified junior developer. Just like I did the day I finally hit send on that email. And just like all of you did by walking into Blast Off Rails, sitting down in this room right now. And that counts. Because together we are the Ruby community. Thank you. >> [applause]