It’s hard to imagine a more foundational command for a Rails developer than bundle install. You run it to get started in a new Rails app, of course, but then you also run it on every deploy, before every build, and with every full test run. Millions of times a day, some developer types bundle install into a terminal and expects it to work.
And mostly it does! I didn’t realize for a long time how unlikely that was. Under the hood, every time you do it, you’re calling on multiple pieces of critical Ruby infrastructure out on the network. All of those pieces have been kept alive over the past decade by mostly-volunteer labor, squeezed in between paying gigs.
I have clients with multi-million-dollar daily revenue streams depending on that infrastructure. Such obvious fragility scares me – and them. It should scare you too, especially because it’s hard to imagine our alternatives.
No Big Patron
The Ruby ecosystem, with a few notable exceptions, is a constellation of hundreds of small and mid-size companies. In some ways that’s fantastic, but it means that there’s no Google like there is for Python, or Oracle like there is for Java. Who, then, should employ people to work on our infrastructure?
Heroku, one of our few truly large companies, already employs Matz, Nobu, and Koichi, all doing necessary work on Ruby itself. But that taps out Heroku, and our companies with 50, 100, or even 500 people don’t have the margins to spend a full-time salary on infrastructure work that doesn’t directly contribute to the bottom line.
Into this breach has come Ruby Together*, driven by André Arko, and pioneering a new model for dependable, secure, and sustainable infrastructure development. It’s a non-profit trade organization (like The Linux Foundation and The Cloud Foundry Foundation) that collects membership dues from companies and individuals. The paid members elect a board, who direct the dues money towards projects that stabilize and improve Ruby infrastructure.
I am pleased to announce today that Tandem has joined Ruby Together as an Emerald Member. Tandem(custom software development company) does a lot of Rails, and both we and our clients have made a lot of money off what has heretofore been free labor. I’m thrilled that there’s now a way for us to do our part to make sure that contributors are compensated, improvements are made, and security patches are written.
Please join us and become a member, along with Stripe, Basecamp, New Relic, and many more! Let’s do something awesome together.
Sarah
P.S.
I think Ruby Together is such a good idea that I became a founding board member. However, I don’t benefit from recruiting new members, unless you count the fact that `bundle install` will continue to work for me.
