Excited to see this posted. We'd previously shared it in a few Slacks and were planning a larger announcement after the long weekend, but since someone beat us to it, we've opened up the early-bird registrations we were saving for Tuesday.
The Ruby for Good in-person event is absolutely not a hackathon. It's a friendly gathering of OS maintainers where we work on existing projects (some have been running for over 10 years!) and kick off new ones. We don't code into the night and burn folks out, either. We have a hard stop every day when we break for dinner. The evenings are reserved for karaoke, conversations and s'more-making around the campfire, board games, and all the other fun nerdery that happens when you get a group of awesome folks together. Really, the best way to think of the event is as "nerd camp for good." Everyone leaves having made a bunch of new close friends.
That's partly because helping non-profits is only part of the RfG mission. The other parts are growing the tech community and helping folks level up, regardless of skill level.
For people interested in attending this year: we'll be working on existing projects as well as kicking off several new ones. With ACA subsidies going away and the number of nonprofits reaching out to us, our focus area this year is healthcare. We'll be launching a project with an Ohio/Illinois nonprofit that works with pediatric cancer patients and their families, another in Virginia that works with cancer caregivers, and a Maryland nonprofit focused on mental health.
If you can't make it, almost all our projects are on GitHub and run year-round, so feel free to grab an issue!
No signs of being AI-generated, and considering several parts of the [codebase of the website](https://github.com/rubyforgood/rubyforgood.org) haven't been touched since before ChatGPT was released, I think you might be barking up the wrong tree.
The apparent founder has replied by saying they ‘just updated today with AI’, but the comment seems to have been deleted since. Not sure whether it was supposed to be serious or ironic. Maybe the latter, since the last commit is two months old. Or maybe the repository hasn’t been updated yet.
Yes, I did comment, sorry for the confusion. And the person who made the comment isn't crazy. We have another branch, claude_design, that was deployed briefly for some folks to look at and review and when he looked at the site it was the brief window that it was deployed. On the off chance that you have a better design sense than claude, love feedback/help on the new design -- and a PR ;)
Actually looking at it on mobile I see a few issues. Scroll on mobile interferes with the slider. Also some of the font sizes are too large and overflow. Is the source repository public? Or was the request for a PR hyperbole?
I'm curious, what companies are sponsoring this Hackathon (if any)? It'd be good to know if there are any tech companies that legitimately stand for good in the world in 2026.
I can't answer for others, but IMO, Ruby is the most elegant and expressive general purpose programming language that has reached a significant level of maturity and large audience.
If you write Ruby for a few years, and then you "go back" to other languages, you will groan. That's not to say that some other languages do not have things that we wish Ruby had, but often those other things would not really fit well with Ruby.
Nothing is perfect from every angle. But writing Ruby can be a joy for some of us.
I think it's the community. As an outsider watching a friend who is deeply involved with the Ruby ecosystem, I am in awe of the support they get even for small, artisanal-seeming projects from other devs in the community. I've seen them become a better a developer simply by showing up to conferences, talking to other maintainers and participating in the community.
Well, Ruby was designed by Matz who is a native Japanese, so it encompasses lot of the Japanese ideals of perfection and beauty.
It's no accident that it's named after one of the rarest gems in nature. This philosophy of craft and beauty is thus instilled within the community and gets carried forward.
I would not know, but I also do not think that an event xyz in one place at time, reflects all of a community either. So I could not tell you what the people there do; probably they want to socialize. I think creating and maintaining high quality project would be much more important but maybe that's just me. All the main drivers in ruby, have been written ages ago really - rails, _why the lucky stiff, even the old "Learn to program" tutorial from Chris Pine and so forth. That is not to say that no innovation has happened since then, of course, but it seems the peak days are really far, far behind now ...
Ruby is still a great programming language, but it really needs to intensify the effort to get out of the pit-of-decline.
We've gotten to a point now where ultimately there needs to be a very short elevator pitch for any language to gain any traction at all. Anything longer than a sentence, it generally won't go far relatively speaking. It's like a calcification/maturity thing in big sectors of software engineering. You need a VERY good reason to upset an incumbent. "Because we know it/because everyone uses it" is a powerful motivator.
Elevator pitch for the language itself or a library/library ecosystem that lets you do things better than in other languages. Ruby originally blew up because Rails was a way people enjoyed writing backend code, despite the speed issues. But the problem is other languages got good enough at writing back ends Ruby was no longer special there and didn't have anything else to back it up the way Python has such strong control of the ML library ecosystem.
> "Because we know it/because everyone uses it" is a powerful motivator.
It's fundamentally a "we want workers to be interchangeable cogs" motivator; it's a deprofessionalizing move that's against the interests of all programmers per se. Managers can repeat it, but there's no good reason for developers to do anything but resist it where we can.
The other side of this for developers is that the places where "everyone knows X" precludes all non-X options are actually signaling loudly that they don't much value developer autonomy. That's a useful signal worth attending to when applying for jobs.
At this point, we should just appreciate Ruby and move on. In the AI age, other languages are better choices. Ruby is my favorite language, but I build with Go now. Or rather, I guide my minions to build with Go. They write Go better than they would write Ruby (or Python... please die, Python).
> an annual event happening this year in the Washington DC area where programmers from all over the globe get together over a long weekend to build and contribute to projects that help our communities
Or, just write code for a project - and add useful documentation to it. This is probably more relevant than overpriced hackathons.
The only programming language I know of that is obsessed with trumpeting its own moral virtue. "Matz is nice so we are nice," "Ruby for good," dragging DHH, etc.
Meanwhile the Ruby Central and whytheluckystiff debacles show it to be anything but.
I wonder what he is up to. I have 2 _why inspired tattoos after he did so much to influence my entire philosophy and style of programming. What a unique character, who happened to pop up at a very formative time for me. Thanks for all the nice stuff and ideas, _why.
That question pops into my mind from time to time, too. Hope he's well, and I hope he knows the lasting positive impact he had on so many people.
I weirdly got my first programming job / made a good friend because of him (he tweeted about wishing he could adopt @person. I looked up @person, saw they lived in my city, worked at a company that was hiring. I DM'd @person, and eventually got the job!" Thanks ~2008 _why!
Dude, what? Is it the MINASWAN acronym that's the problem or? If that's "trumpeting moral virtue", I can think of lots of programming languages that trumpet their moral virtue:
"Please be kind and courteous. There’s no need to be mean or rude."
"We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic."
"As a community, we want to be friendly too. People from around the world, of all backgrounds, genders, and experience levels are welcome and respected equally. See our community code of conduct for more.
Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t."
Seems morally virtuous, too!
Also also: what does the "whytheluckystiff debacle" have to do with any of this?! Also also also: _why was pretty much the first prominent "dragger" of dhh. Man was an innovator.
I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.
You can cheaply and readably give a lot of clues to both agents and humans with some assertions at the start of a method:
raise ArgumentError.new("...") unless ...
which can include type assertions but also a lot more. The agents seem to do well with this.
I've also had good results using agents to write Crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ which is Ruby-like but does have the static types and produces blazing fast static binaries. Might be a sweet spot for coding agents if you're building some backend services. But I'd still pick Ruby on Rails for a new full stack project.
I feel like your comment is a bit tongue in cheek and i am going to take it at face value, but I honestly been feeling increasingly more like doing verbatim what you're suggesting and i dont have a very solid justification for it.
I meant it honestly. What excuse do people have to choose anything other than mission critical technologies if the AI system can do most of the heavy lifting? Why should we settle for anything less than five 9s of uptime?
That seems like it would depend quite a bit on the project? I would think many nonprofits would want a webapp of some flavor, and Ruby (or Python) are still not bad choices there - my experience with Claude is that it handles Ruby well.
Agents handle Ruby just fine. I used to have to give them some stern rules about avoiding instance_variable_get etc. instead of adding accessors, but those problems have pretty much vanished in the last 6 months.
I like using Ruby with agents because the code remains short and readable.
I’m downvoting because this is basically bait without any contribution as to why you feel that way, but personally I vibe coded a very successful result by iterating a rails app and then crawling the entire site into static files (~144,000 product pages and category pages) and then stashing them all in a bucket on cloudflare free tier.
I never wrote ruby before so I could only sanity check the results and approach of what it was doing, but thanks to the automated data migrations it was very easy for me to change my mind about how I wanted data to be structured, rollback if it didn’t work etc. it is a language designed for rapid iteration.
Not sure about the compiler but prominent users of llm agents (Mitchel Hashimoto, Armin Ronacher etc) has mentioned that Go gives better results for agentic coding.
Compiler errors help the chatbot find and fix problems. The equivalent in Ruby, RBS, isn't as widely adopted. Type annotations being in separate files is also inconvenient.
Hey all, I'm Sean, the founder of Ruby for Good!
Excited to see this posted. We'd previously shared it in a few Slacks and were planning a larger announcement after the long weekend, but since someone beat us to it, we've opened up the early-bird registrations we were saving for Tuesday.
The Ruby for Good in-person event is absolutely not a hackathon. It's a friendly gathering of OS maintainers where we work on existing projects (some have been running for over 10 years!) and kick off new ones. We don't code into the night and burn folks out, either. We have a hard stop every day when we break for dinner. The evenings are reserved for karaoke, conversations and s'more-making around the campfire, board games, and all the other fun nerdery that happens when you get a group of awesome folks together. Really, the best way to think of the event is as "nerd camp for good." Everyone leaves having made a bunch of new close friends.
That's partly because helping non-profits is only part of the RfG mission. The other parts are growing the tech community and helping folks level up, regardless of skill level.
For people interested in attending this year: we'll be working on existing projects as well as kicking off several new ones. With ACA subsidies going away and the number of nonprofits reaching out to us, our focus area this year is healthcare. We'll be launching a project with an Ohio/Illinois nonprofit that works with pediatric cancer patients and their families, another in Virginia that works with cancer caregivers, and a Maryland nonprofit focused on mental health.
If you can't make it, almost all our projects are on GitHub and run year-round, so feel free to grab an issue!
The actual Ruby for Good website has more information: https://rubyforgood.org/
Sadly Ai generated. Bummer.
No signs of being AI-generated, and considering several parts of the [codebase of the website](https://github.com/rubyforgood/rubyforgood.org) haven't been touched since before ChatGPT was released, I think you might be barking up the wrong tree.
The apparent founder has replied by saying they ‘just updated today with AI’, but the comment seems to have been deleted since. Not sure whether it was supposed to be serious or ironic. Maybe the latter, since the last commit is two months old. Or maybe the repository hasn’t been updated yet.
Yes, I did comment, sorry for the confusion. And the person who made the comment isn't crazy. We have another branch, claude_design, that was deployed briefly for some folks to look at and review and when he looked at the site it was the brief window that it was deployed. On the off chance that you have a better design sense than claude, love feedback/help on the new design -- and a PR ;)
Actually looking at it on mobile I see a few issues. Scroll on mobile interferes with the slider. Also some of the font sizes are too large and overflow. Is the source repository public? Or was the request for a PR hyperbole?
Edit: I see it was posted a few comments up.
Honestly Claude is not great at front end design. So it’s more than an “off chance”. That being said I think the site looks fine.
Opus 4.6 and 4.7 can probably come up with something better than most open source contributors, given a few iterations.
We should figure out how to get more designers contributing to open source.
I’m glad to see conferences like this exist. It creates dedicated space for these focuses and the people who care passionately about them.
I'm curious, what companies are sponsoring this Hackathon (if any)? It'd be good to know if there are any tech companies that legitimately stand for good in the world in 2026.
I just want to say thank you for all your good work. We are very proud to have been a small part of your efforts at Cloud 66. Keep up the good work.
Hackathons can be a blast. That said, it usually takes extra effort to productionize-a-thing after the initial hackathon effort.
Hope to see a follow-up post on what was built!
I volunteered a few years ago and had a great experience.
Why does Ruby still have this artisinal aura to it, never seen C/C++ For Good gathering.
I can't answer for others, but IMO, Ruby is the most elegant and expressive general purpose programming language that has reached a significant level of maturity and large audience.
If you write Ruby for a few years, and then you "go back" to other languages, you will groan. That's not to say that some other languages do not have things that we wish Ruby had, but often those other things would not really fit well with Ruby.
Nothing is perfect from every angle. But writing Ruby can be a joy for some of us.
There's a huge amount of wonderful people in the community too.
There are. But also.. so much drama. Like soooo much drama
I'm going to edit this: much of this is rails, we know why that is, so apologies to rubyists
I think it's the community. As an outsider watching a friend who is deeply involved with the Ruby ecosystem, I am in awe of the support they get even for small, artisanal-seeming projects from other devs in the community. I've seen them become a better a developer simply by showing up to conferences, talking to other maintainers and participating in the community.
Well, Ruby was designed by Matz who is a native Japanese, so it encompasses lot of the Japanese ideals of perfection and beauty.
It's no accident that it's named after one of the rarest gems in nature. This philosophy of craft and beauty is thus instilled within the community and gets carried forward.
I would not know, but I also do not think that an event xyz in one place at time, reflects all of a community either. So I could not tell you what the people there do; probably they want to socialize. I think creating and maintaining high quality project would be much more important but maybe that's just me. All the main drivers in ruby, have been written ages ago really - rails, _why the lucky stiff, even the old "Learn to program" tutorial from Chris Pine and so forth. That is not to say that no innovation has happened since then, of course, but it seems the peak days are really far, far behind now ...
Ruby is still a great programming language, but it really needs to intensify the effort to get out of the pit-of-decline.
> Ruby is still a great programming language, but it really needs to intensify the effort to get out of the pit-of-decline.
The languages that have supplanted it haven't succeeded by being excellent. If excellence won't do it, what should "Ruby" do?
We've gotten to a point now where ultimately there needs to be a very short elevator pitch for any language to gain any traction at all. Anything longer than a sentence, it generally won't go far relatively speaking. It's like a calcification/maturity thing in big sectors of software engineering. You need a VERY good reason to upset an incumbent. "Because we know it/because everyone uses it" is a powerful motivator.
Elevator pitch for the language itself or a library/library ecosystem that lets you do things better than in other languages. Ruby originally blew up because Rails was a way people enjoyed writing backend code, despite the speed issues. But the problem is other languages got good enough at writing back ends Ruby was no longer special there and didn't have anything else to back it up the way Python has such strong control of the ML library ecosystem.
> "Because we know it/because everyone uses it" is a powerful motivator.
It's fundamentally a "we want workers to be interchangeable cogs" motivator; it's a deprofessionalizing move that's against the interests of all programmers per se. Managers can repeat it, but there's no good reason for developers to do anything but resist it where we can.
The other side of this for developers is that the places where "everyone knows X" precludes all non-X options are actually signaling loudly that they don't much value developer autonomy. That's a useful signal worth attending to when applying for jobs.
At this point, we should just appreciate Ruby and move on. In the AI age, other languages are better choices. Ruby is my favorite language, but I build with Go now. Or rather, I guide my minions to build with Go. They write Go better than they would write Ruby (or Python... please die, Python).
Ruby is a great utility language target for LLM-generated tools.
I wonder if Google was the X factor why Python edged out Ruby.
> an annual event happening this year in the Washington DC area where programmers from all over the globe get together over a long weekend to build and contribute to projects that help our communities
Or, just write code for a project - and add useful documentation to it. This is probably more relevant than overpriced hackathons.
The only programming language I know of that is obsessed with trumpeting its own moral virtue. "Matz is nice so we are nice," "Ruby for good," dragging DHH, etc.
Meanwhile the Ruby Central and whytheluckystiff debacles show it to be anything but.
_why’s disappearance from the scene was 17 years ago at this point. I don’t think the Ruby community you’re talking about exists anymore.
I wonder what he is up to. I have 2 _why inspired tattoos after he did so much to influence my entire philosophy and style of programming. What a unique character, who happened to pop up at a very formative time for me. Thanks for all the nice stuff and ideas, _why.
That question pops into my mind from time to time, too. Hope he's well, and I hope he knows the lasting positive impact he had on so many people.
I weirdly got my first programming job / made a good friend because of him (he tweeted about wishing he could adopt @person. I looked up @person, saw they lived in my city, worked at a company that was hiring. I DM'd @person, and eventually got the job!" Thanks ~2008 _why!
Dude, what? Is it the MINASWAN acronym that's the problem or? If that's "trumpeting moral virtue", I can think of lots of programming languages that trumpet their moral virtue:
Let's check out the Rust Code of Conduct (https://rust-lang.org/policies/code-of-conduct/):
"Please be kind and courteous. There’s no need to be mean or rude."
"We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic."
Seems pretty morally virtuous, no?
How 'bout Gleam... Right on their home page (https://gleam.run):
"As a community, we want to be friendly too. People from around the world, of all backgrounds, genders, and experience levels are welcome and respected equally. See our community code of conduct for more.
Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t."
Seems morally virtuous, too!
Also also: what does the "whytheluckystiff debacle" have to do with any of this?! Also also also: _why was pretty much the first prominent "dragger" of dhh. Man was an innovator.
The CoC reminds me a lot of this quote by Sowell:
"...if the answer to the problem is that people should just be virtuous, then there is no problem, because we have known that for thousands of years."
I love Ruby and have built my career on it, but is it the right language to be starting new projects with given agentic coding? My take is "no." Rust or TS are probably better choices right now.
You can cheaply and readably give a lot of clues to both agents and humans with some assertions at the start of a method:
which can include type assertions but also a lot more. The agents seem to do well with this.I've also had good results using agents to write Crystal https://crystal-lang.org/ which is Ruby-like but does have the static types and produces blazing fast static binaries. Might be a sweet spot for coding agents if you're building some backend services. But I'd still pick Ruby on Rails for a new full stack project.
Why go halfway with Rust when you could just pick Ada SPARK? Seems like an arbitrary choice based off of rationalizing a trend.
I feel like your comment is a bit tongue in cheek and i am going to take it at face value, but I honestly been feeling increasingly more like doing verbatim what you're suggesting and i dont have a very solid justification for it.
I meant it honestly. What excuse do people have to choose anything other than mission critical technologies if the AI system can do most of the heavy lifting? Why should we settle for anything less than five 9s of uptime?
Because you pick Ada Spark if are in a certification heavy environment like Aerospace.
That seems like it would depend quite a bit on the project? I would think many nonprofits would want a webapp of some flavor, and Ruby (or Python) are still not bad choices there - my experience with Claude is that it handles Ruby well.
Agents handle Ruby just fine. I used to have to give them some stern rules about avoiding instance_variable_get etc. instead of adding accessors, but those problems have pretty much vanished in the last 6 months.
I like using Ruby with agents because the code remains short and readable.
I’m downvoting because this is basically bait without any contribution as to why you feel that way, but personally I vibe coded a very successful result by iterating a rails app and then crawling the entire site into static files (~144,000 product pages and category pages) and then stashing them all in a bucket on cloudflare free tier.
I never wrote ruby before so I could only sanity check the results and approach of what it was doing, but thanks to the automated data migrations it was very easy for me to change my mind about how I wanted data to be structured, rollback if it didn’t work etc. it is a language designed for rapid iteration.
The typescript team themselves rewrote the compiler in Go to get better use of coding agents.
They started that migration years ago. I don't remember them citing agentic coding as a reason. Do you have a source?
Not sure about the compiler but prominent users of llm agents (Mitchel Hashimoto, Armin Ronacher etc) has mentioned that Go gives better results for agentic coding.
They did it for speed, and Go was the language with the closest syntax to migrate to.
Agentic coding is not a given anywhere.
I understand why rust, but why TS? just for a front end?
Compiler errors help the chatbot find and fix problems. The equivalent in Ruby, RBS, isn't as widely adopted. Type annotations being in separate files is also inconvenient.
https://github.com/ruby/rbs
I feel for a smallish project I'd rather prefer to have more readable, dense code like Ruby's over the ceremony of static types.
There is almost no ceremony involved in dealing with types in Rust.
And what little there is, is worth it ten-fold for all of the runtime bug headaches that you avoid compared to dynamically typed languages.
Specifically addressing the "almost no ceremony" claim and not the "totally worth it" claim:
JS:
Rust: And that's before we start talking about function signatures and traits.