Thursday, September 17, 2026

The Embarrassing Ruby/Rails Community Chronicles 2026-09-17

The life of a Ruby dev in 2026! I made an effort to post a recorded talk that I gave at my local Montreal Ruby meetup as a helpful gesture for the benefit of the Ruby community at large. And, I suddenly see a comment (included below) get posted in the Ruby subreddit, which reeks of hate and discrimination against me personally and has no respectful conduct of appreciation for a service done during my free time for the benefit of others. Who allows trash people like that into the Ruby subreddit?!! So, the commenter literally discriminates against me and expresses hate against me, saying he wants me to "drop out". I don't even know the commenter. I never did anything bad to hurt the commenter. Quite the contrary. I posted a helpful post for the benefit of the commenter and everyone in the Ruby community. Still, the commenter wants me to "drop out". Next, he mentions that the Montreal Ruby meetup has dwindled to a handful of people after I took over it with a very hateful negative tone, when in fact, without me, the group had ZERO attendees and was dead for years, and I revived it in 2022 with the help of another co-organizer, growing the group again to more than ZERO attendees. That's the opposite of what that commenter tried to allude to. Let alone, I am literally the most consistently present Ruby dev at those meetups, and I am the only Ruby dev from the Montreal Ruby community in the last 4 years who has presented at RubyConf multiple times and has supported many Ruby open-source projects while winning awards for 2 of them from Matz. 

Besides, even if the group had dwindled down to a few members compared to pre-Covid numbers. That is the responsibility of the attendees slacking and switching to other languages. I know a number of past attendees of the meetup who have switched professionally to Elixir, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and other programming languages. While I am disappointed in their decision, it is 100% their loss not mine if they don't use Ruby anymore and don't attend the Ruby meetup. I still believe Ruby is the most fluent, expressive, elegant, productive, and maintainable programming language for general business application development, and I think that other languages are either inferior, like JavaScript & Python, or are considered premature optimizations that aren't truly needed in 90% of business usecases, like Elixir and TypeScript. Still, if that's what other devs chose, it's their responsibility alone.

The haters in the Ruby community have shown their face very explicitly now and it's no longer a matter of pretending to be non-haters while hiding under plausible deniability. The hate is very explicit, real, and fully exposed for everyone to see.

So, who allowed the haters into the Ruby subreddit community and encouraged their hate by tolerating hateful comments that have a very negative tone like the comment shared above?

I checked the list of Moderators, and here is what I found from among older moderators that have been around for a long time (not all of them, but some of them for sure, excluding the AutoModerator).

Those moderators have allowed hate to fester in the Ruby subreddit for years while giving a group of haters a free pass to post hateful disrespectful comments with a very hateful discriminatory tone against a number of Ruby experts like me who have done more for the benefit of the Ruby community than all the haters combined through talks at RubyConf and RailsConf and open-source projects. I call them out for doing a very shitty job. They totally suck. 

None of the haters in the Ruby subreddit would pass the minimum criteria of respectful conduct to get hired at any of the good Ruby shops I've worked at. So, why allow any people who don't pass the minimum criteria of respectful conduct to be hired at good companies into a Ruby subreddit to begin with? Those people are no different from random hobos and drug criminals one encounters on the streets with their hateful discriminatory negative conduct. So, what on earth are they doing in a Ruby subreddit if they don't pass the minimum code of conduct needed to be hired at any respectful ethical good companies! This is either a case of double-standards, which would implicate some of the moderators above as practicing discrimination, or a case of intentionally simping to unqualified people to feel like "heroes" (the hero worship complex). It's bad in either way. Be better!!!

If the Ruby community was healthy, a Ruby dev oughta be able to share a video they recorded for the benefit of the Ruby community in peace and with complete dignity and respect. Unfortunately, that's not the case in 2026. The Ruby community has deteriorated into trash because of terrible mods like the ones above.

Montreal.rb February 2026 Crystal: Ruby with Static Typing

The video and slides for the Montreal.rb February 2026 talk "Crystal: Ruby with Static Typing" have been published! Keep in mind this was more of a "hey, I discovered something cool" talk at a casual Ruby meetup, not a comprehensive tutorial at a software conference. The talk has so much material (that could fill a 3 day bootcamp) that it had to fly through the material very quickly, which can be jarring. The real exciting bit to any real Rubyist though is that Crystal has similar syntax to Ruby's and similar performance to that of C/C++/Rust. That is extremely exciting and awesome!!! It means Rubyists don't have to struggle through C or Rust's syntax to get performance enhancement as they have a much more elegant option in Crystal.

YouTube Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UwWbQi-eEo

Presentation Slides: 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vRVWX6mMfCNA5WQo3q1PVu4ImlOq-wG_9Ekd6bRgF2U8fQoeq7FsHJ0z4Bx2Njgw-4ZUEHC64t9AOTx/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=60000

Talk Description:

Crystal is a relatively new programming language that aims to emulate Ruby's syntax as much as possible while supporting Static Typing.

Although Ruby remains the most convenient and productive programming language for business app development due to handling types automatically with Dynamic Typing, in about 1% of Business Software Development cases, Crystal can help out when there is a need for much higher performance in response-time-sensitive and performance-intensive computations.

In a recent RubyConf keynote speech, Matz (the creator of Ruby) compared using a Dynamically Typed language like Ruby to driving a car with an automatic stickshift and using a Statically Typed language like C to driving a car with a manual stickshift. Most of the time, the convenience and productivity benefits of automatic stickshift are more desirable to deliver value in a timely fashion to customers. But, every once in a while, driving manual could be a very useful alternative for the few cases that need it. As such, it is valuable to learn Crystal for the sake of augmenting Ruby with a language that trades off some programmer friendliness for performance whenever needed.

This talk will provide a general overview of the Crystal programming language and show some Crystal code examples.

Monday, September 14, 2026

Video: Glimmer DSL for Web 0.10.5 Before & After Mutations

Release video for Glimmer DSL for Web (Award-Winning Frontend Framework for Ruby on Rails) version 0.10.5 (Before & After Mutations): https://youtu.be/BJ0oSsyddMg

Support Award-Winning Open-Source Projects for the Benefit of the Ruby Community!

I got a weird message from a dev on LinkedIn sharing with me a Frontend UI he built in Opal Ruby, supposedly as inspiration by my library Glimmer DSL for Web (award-winning Opal Frontend Framework for Rails). Except, he said at the end that he didn't use Glimmer DSL for Web, yet used Opal Ruby directly. The guy claimed he wanted to "experiment" with not relying on the MVC pattern. Except, every Software Engineer worth his salt should already know the difference between View code that mixes Model and Controller concerns by not relying on MVC (like Views from the early PHP era) and View code that separates them following MVC, which is what makes MVC so vital to ensuring correct separation of concerns, maintainability, readability, and simplicity. Such an experiment does not provide any new information that wasn't known 20 years ago. I took a look at his codebase. The code was very horrid and horrible. It was over-complicated. It was exactly what I built Glimmer DSL for Web to simplify and avoid. 

This is a big problem in the Ruby community today. Not building on top of good ideas already implemented and available in some open-source projects, yet re-inventing the wheel unnecessarily with inferior solutions. For example, I ran into a Rubyist who rewrote ERB to supposedly "improve" (inside-the-box-thinking) instead of ascending higher to better solutions (outside-the-box-thinking), like using an HTML DSL such as Glimmer's or Phlex's, objectively superior and more elegant for so many reasons. At RailsConf 2014, one of the keynote speakers, Yahuda Katz, alluded to how Rails provides a framework that elevates people with basic building blocks ready to go so they could start constructing a building with the first 10 or 40 floors done already (not the exact words, but that was the general idea). That's exactly what Glimmer DSL for Web aims to provide for the Frontend of Rails web apps! It offers all the building blocks needed to build any Frontend Web UI with the simplest code syntax possible in any programming language. So, when people ignore it, they just go back to starting at the first floor. Extremely unintelligent.

I told that guy that he wasn't really inspired by me if he didn't use Glimmer DSL for Web. I asked him why he was seeking a non-MVC solution. He didn't respond. I messaged him again on LinkedIn a number of weeks later reminding him he didn't respond. He never got back to me. So weird! This came across as the guy intentionally trolling me with this whole exercise, just to intentionally create an example of not using my library where the library is most perfect to use. I would literally delete and simplify a lot of his code if his web UI Frontend was built in Glimmer DSL for Web. He didn't seem sincere in his message given his lack of follow through. Needless to say, after I did some research on the guy, I found out he's an uneducated person with no university degrees in any computing related fields (like Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering or even computing heavy fields like Math, Physics, Mechanical Engineering, or Biology), meaning basic Software Engineering concepts that are expected as foundational knowledge in professional Software Engineers are not available in his repertoire, which would explain why he was trying to do something as senseless as avoiding MVC.

Avoid being like this guy and help open-source projects that have already solved interesting problems with very good innovative solutions that won awards! Especially a Ruby project that won an award by the creator of the programming language it uses. Such projects have already been proven. They just need your support to go further for the benefit of the Software Engineering community as a whole. Use them and provide feedback. Any time you spend not using such projects is wasted on inferior solutions. Build 3rd party libraries on top of them. Contribute features and bug fixes to them. Contribute documentation. Don't just branch off on your own and re-invent the wheel if it isn't necessary or useful. That's very unintelligent and counterproductive for the Ruby community.

Monday, September 07, 2026