All of this focus on a Rails Maturity Model has me wondering, what about Rails or Ruby Conservation? How do we take what has been so good about this language that we are all so passionate about and ensure that it doesn’t get side-swiped by the brooding enterprise transition? 

I went to my first Ruby User Group this evening and I’m still floating. I left thinking, “this is what the Ruby community is all about!” I feel like I’m finally getting it. This little community rocks! I get why Rubyists were outraged over RailsConf moving to Las Vegas. I get why Zed was so fucking pissed off in his ghetto rant. I get why Giles calls out Chad Fowler. I never really understood the understated awesomeness of the Ruby/Rails community until I actually sat at a user group and then had drinks with fellow Rubyists.

I cannot even begin to imagine what it would be like to sit in a .NET or a Java User Group. Do they even have those? I can picture it, though it pains me: lots of men in business suits, wielding expensive pens and dumb heavy Dell laptops. They talk in loud, booming voices, each trying to exert his own self-importance. They pretend to be interested as they listen some verbose mucky muck presentation, then they sit around in the office talking about their development environments and their enterprise software.

Tonight I sat in a room for 2 hours and I watched, I learned, I laughed. I had more fun than I’ve had in a long time. I watched an awesome guy wearings jeans and a t-shirt do a very informed presentation on state machines; he was even able to incorporate Batman into his slides! Then I saw a web designer give a whimsically animated presentation on Proce55or. And finally, a soft-spoken math guy showed us benchmark testing he wrote to compare Ruby 1.8 and 1.9.  Ruby itself affords its community a level of intimate camaraderie that many languages cannot offer. It’s natural to get excited about and attached to a language that is actually fun to use. It’s worth promoting, it’s worth preserving.

When I read that Rails was moving to Vegas it didn’t sit right with me. And I’m not even a legitimate Rails dev. Despite the organizer’s outright denial, it certainly is an omen that Rails is moving to the enterprise scene, and apparently they have no problem pairing that transition with “steaks and strippers.” And yes, realistically Ruby/Rails enterprise should make most devs happy because that ultimately means more job opportunities and probably higher salaries.

But, it’s bittersweet, because I have to wonder what the community will be like 5 years from now. Will it be this tight-knit and this organic? Will a total newb like myself receive tons of help and direction from people that I’ve never met, just because I share a passion for the same language? Will there be as much passion? Will there still be people working hard to offer fringe conferences like Ruby DCamp, and RubyFringe as alternatives to the Rails whore house that RailsConf is becoming?

It used to feel as though Ruby and Rails was led by the open community that it spawned, but now it seems that the future of Rails and Ruby lies in the hands of a scant few that appear to be empty suits.  I’m not naive enough to sit here and claim that Ruby shouldn’t go enterprise. It happens to all intrinsically good languages, in due time.

Ruby and Rails enterprising doesn’t have to be ghetto. RMM, for example is something that I think helps to setup a space for Rails in the enterprise world but at the same time declares it sacred. RMM will help improve the Ruby experience on the client side of things; anyone who has seen the horrific crimes that are committed against clients might agree that RMM might actually be a good idea. It allows a client to hold a few cards in their hand, and a balance of power isn’t a bad thing in a business transaction.

While there are people out there like Obie working to create a good space for Rails enterprise, we still need more people working to preserve the open, organic community space that attracted and kept so many of us here in the first place. 

So, thank you to the people that are working so hard to preserve the “niceness” of Ruby and Rails; like the guys that organize the user groups, plan the small local events, offer help to people on forums, contribute to open-source projects, and to people like Mike Gunderloy that invited me (despite my newbness) to work on his project in order for me to get some experience. And a big thank you to companies like Intridea and other small shops that let their Ruby developers, like my husband, work from their home offices or coffee shops. It’s all about being happy and doing things the right way. That’s what I love about Ruby, that’s what I love about Rails, and hell no I won’t be going to Vegas to witness the perversion of something beautiful.