DAVID HILL
Happy Wednesday and welcome to the show. I'm your host, David Hill. I recently discovered the wonderful Ruby User Forum and thought it would be a great idea to have one of the creators of the Ruby User Forum on the show to talk about it. So joining me today is Javier Cervantes. Javier, thanks for having me. Excited to talk about the forum and other stuff. Awesome. So let's kind of start there, the Ruby User Forum. How did this project get started?
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, so I mean, I've been working. as a software engineer for almost two decades now. And I discovered Ruby in 2012, 2013. And it always kept a very special place in my heart because I think it is very expressive. The community has always been very open. But then after working on Ruby for two or three years, I moved to other technologies and did some other types of work, working with JavaScript and e -commerce and other types of systems. And it was not until two years ago, approximately, that I came back to Ruby. At first, it was like a desert. I couldn't find what was going on, especially because I knew Ruby when it was in school and Ruby on Rails.
DAVID HILL
Rails.
JAVIER CERVANTES
At first, I felt a little bit lost because, I mean, I had... the notions of how everything worked but i couldn't find the documentation the guides the people talking about things but after a while i discovered that there was a lot of things happening on the ruby ecosystem but it was more fragmented than before and i decided to start just writing about it so i started writing some guides and some compiling links of useful resources and things like that. And I started a site called Ruby Newbie. So that went well for around six months or so. But then, as you know, like educational content and newbies right now are not having a good time. So while I was working on that, I felt that Ruby didn't have an active forum. I found really cool forums for Rust, for Python, for Go, for almost any other major programming language. But there was no access for Ruby. So that's when I said I probably should give it a try and see if we can get a Ruby forum started. And that's when I partnered with Gemma to start the forum at the end of last year. And we've been doing that for almost a year now. And yeah, it's been kind of, well, it all born from the necessity of finding where is the Ruby resources and what's happening on the Ruby community.
DAVID HILL
When I first kind of was told and pointed towards the Ruby forum, I thought it was really kind of almost a throwback to an earlier era of the internet because With the way things have evolved with social media and Slack and Discord and all these other venues for communication, having a kind of an old school web forum. I don't know. There's something about that. It's like, oh, yeah, I remember back in the day when such simpler times.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, yeah, definitely. It feels like a treat to the past sometimes. I think the forums... Everything's slower, and nowadays everything is very fast. You have to be in 70 different Slack channels and 30 Discords. Sometimes you miss important conversations that happened yesterday or in the morning while you were working. And I feel like with the forum, you get this asynchronous flow where you can have a conversation across the whole week. And also you get this summary of what's happening on the forum. If you miss something, you can jump in and talk about it. So I think there's a lot of new things, but at least the way my mind works and how I work, I feel like I'm always struggling with keeping up with things that are happening. And for me, the forum is a place to think, one, have these slower and more asynchronous conversations. And also I think there are some, for example, great newsletters in the Ruby community or there's some blog posts that are great and I follow those people. But I think also these interactive two -way streets know about different things that people are thinking about and just get like behind the scenes thinking of someone that's working on an open source project. I think that's something that we can get with a forum.
DAVID HILL
can get with a forum. I also sometimes feel like we're in a different era of the internet.
DAVID HILL
like we're in a different era of the internet. That makes sense. So how long has the Ruby forum been up and running?
JAVIER CERVANTES
So it started like in a beta in December of 2025. So it's been like nine months. How has the project been going since it's launched? So, I mean, it's been going great. It's a lot of work and it's hard because... Obviously, you have to build trust to have people participating and getting people to know you. So there's a lot of outreach and setting things up and getting content and reaching out to people and stuff like that. But I think we're doing a good job in terms of growth. We're almost 500 at this point. I always try to do a comparison with other active forums on the Ruby community, and we're already the top Ruby forum in terms of the others that are specific to projects like Rails or Hanami. But still, I think we're getting there. I think there's obviously a lot of opportunity to keep growing. I think we've found that there's people that are looking for that title. content and interaction and that's been great and also it's been like a great opportunity to meet new people learn about new projects and just trying to partner together with other people doing cool stuff in the Ruby ecosystem obviously there's a lot of things and ideas but there's not enough time to work on those but hopefully we can still continue to work on it slowly or surely and I think Always the idea with the forum is to build something long term. So I think in two or three years, we'll see. I think we can get to interesting places. Cool. But we're just getting started.
DAVID HILL
And you might have touched on this already, but we were just kind of talking about with social media and Slack and Discord and Reddit. Was there a particular reason that you settled on wanting to create this very old school forum instead of going with something? in air quotes, more modern?
JAVIER CERVANTES
I think Discord is great because it gives you a lot of moderation tools and automation of emails and things like that that you don't get with Discord or Slack. And I don't like particularly, for example, if we start with the chat platforms like Slack or Discord, I think they're great, but usually most of the communities on the free version, so a lot of conversations get lost. in the garden and get deleted forever. And the other part is this idea of searching for things or finding things. It's really sometimes very hard and it's more like immediate communication. So chats have a place and I use them, but I think you can complement that with something that is more like a forum. And the other part is... the fragmentation of the system. So I think one of the disadvantages of Discord and Slack and all that is that you have to log in into all those different things. And it's the same thing with social media. Some people are using Blue Sky, some people are using X, some people are using Mastodon. So there's really no one place where you can talk and collaborate with people across the full ecosystem because people are... posting in different places and it's kind of a way to consolidate things in a single place but it's at the same time like the biggest challenge because one of the concerns is for people to log in into an extra system but I think as we grow and we're able to get more people participating it's going to be more valuable because instead of having to be on Five different projects, you can be on the forum and talk about the five different projects there.
DAVID HILL
Yeah. I've felt that problem before, just the fragmentation of the audience, like you were talking about. You never even know when something's going to explode. A couple of years ago, it felt like there was a huge exodus of most of the people that I knew in the Ruby community leaving X slash Twitter and moving to Mastodon or Blue Sky. anything other than twitter you don't know where the audience is going to move because someone who owns the business did something that was unpopular yeah exactly and you're depending always on things it also happened with slack where a lot of communities were using were getting like the free version and they had infinite chat logs and then they changed the way it worked and now everyone is from the more limited version so you
JAVIER CERVANTES
exactly and you're depending always on things it also happened with slack where a lot of communities were using were getting like the free version and they had infinite chat logs and then they changed the way it worked and now everyone is from the more limited version so you basically lost years of conversations and channels because you're depending on a third party. So that type of independence, I think it's also important to do something up there.
DAVID HILL
Are there any particular highlights that you would like to mention and talk about from the experience that you've had of having the Ruby user forum up and running?
JAVIER CERVANTES
I mean, obviously we try to post things and keep conversation going, but I think one of the most rewarding things is having people come up with different activities and ideas to participate in the forum. One of those was this Cassidy Williams. Cassidy has this newsletter and she posts an interview question each week. So regularly you can... post your answer on a guest or on your social media or whatever. So one of the members decided to start posting each week the question. And it's been great because you can compare the answers with the others and then it's get more collaborative process.
JAVIER CERVANTES
And sometimes we've always, sometimes some benchmarks. So I think it's... The newsletter and the interview question was happening there, but I think it's just another layer of interactivity and a learning opportunity for more people to participate and be involved. So I think that that was one that I think was great. And the other thing that we did the last month was to invite open source maintainers to bring their discussion. So usually, Happens the same thing with most of the projects. Either host their discussions either on GitHub discussions or they have a Discord or something where people can ask questions and do things like that because I don't think nobody uses Stack Overflow anymore.
DAVID HILL
I don't think nobody uses Stack Overflow anymore.
JAVIER CERVANTES
But what we did is like invited different open source maintainers to bring their discussions to the forum. and try to see if that gets some more cross -pollination. So instead of having a separate forum or a separate chat channel, just we're creating tags for each of the projects and then people can ask questions or they can announce new versions or improvements of the gems or the open source projects. And we've been doing that. It's been great. I think there's still a lot that... could be done but i think that bringing people together with what they're doing and highlight what it's already happening i think it's one of the goals of the forum and that has helped us to also get more people involved and participating so obviously we always open to new projects so if anyone listening has a project and wants to bring their discussions to the forum i think it's a great opportunity and It also helps to remove some of the load of having to moderate and sustain and maintain the community on your own. And you can take advantage of the infrastructure and the forum.
DAVID HILL
So much of what I love about the Ruby community is the community. So helping to have kind of more centralized, for lack of a better word, places where you can kind of gather and... hopefully kind of have some of those incidental encounters of meeting people or having conversations you might not have found other places has just been so valuable for me. And so I love having that here.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, I think that is great because sometimes for a small project, it's hard to get a lot of traction or views, but there's some interesting things sometimes happening on the borders. And I think giving them like a spotlight helps. more people know about it and then we can all learn from each other. I mean, for example, right now I'm working on a Rails project and I'm using some of the dry gems to do some validations and do some actions and things like that, that I was basically reinventing the wheel inside of Rails. So I think it's great to know like different tools and things that are happening and you never know. when you're going to need or when you can use something different.
DAVID HILL
Especially these days with AI and everything else that it's doing to kind of our software writing industry, it always feels like there's something else going on, something new that you may have missed or that you could learn about.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah. And I think, I mean, other things that I enjoy a lot is talking to people. And I think right now we're spending too much time talking with the LLMs.
DAVID HILL
And I
JAVIER CERVANTES
too much time talking with the LLMs. And I think we could, spend a little bit more time talking with other people because it's always great to learn new things, share about what you're learning. And obviously it's very fast to get an answer from an LLM, but I think the experience of getting the perspective of someone else that is working on something, that's something that you cannot get there, right?
DAVID HILL
By definition, you can't get that from the LLM because it's not a person. A mathematical average of responses that it's calculated.
JAVIER CERVANTES
mathematical average
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, exactly. Sometimes I think we forget about that. But I think it's just another way to collaborate and meet new people. And we're also trying to partner with existing initiatives of the Ruby ecosystem. So we're trying to partner with people that are organizing meetups. We're trying to... partner with the Ruby events folks that are doing a great job to index everything that's happening on the conferences and middle space. And we're also trying to like, obviously, an event or a conference is a very different experience than being online. But I think we can complement each other in terms like maybe you meet someone and you can keep talking about it on the forum, right? Or maybe... you have a great insight on a talk you saw on an event, and then you can share it with the others. Or maybe you're the presenter and you want to get everything back on your presentation before you present it. And also a good opportunity to talk to others and see what their reaction is.
DAVID HILL
So what's next for the Ruby User Forum? Do you have anything coming up?
JAVIER CERVANTES
We're trying to partner with more initiatives. We have the XO movie coming here to Toronto. Where am I? So I'm excited to meet some people in person and see if we can make some new partnerships and see what we can get from there. We're also having some surprises. Like we have a supporters program and we're going to be adding like more benefits and things there. So I think that's going to be great, but we're still working on it. And the other thing is just keeping by the people, making sure we get more projects, more people, more maintainers. And I think it's just a matter of getting to that level when it starts to be self -sustainable. Because right now, I would say most of the work is in the outreach, content, posting and all that. But I think... If we can get to a point where the effort is more in the maintenance and keeping things running, it's going to be better for everyone. But it's fine. I think we're in an interesting phase because I think we're at a level where we kind of reach a plateau of members and participation. So we need to figure out what we need to do next to grow to maybe a thousand or more members.
DAVID HILL
While you're talking about that, I suddenly had this kind of a thought of like, maybe I should like start posting more on the Ruby user form about the podcast is like announcing new episodes there or looking for conversations about existing episodes to see like ways that I can ask questions or do these recordings in a way that will appeal to more parts of the community. So I might be showing up there more in the future just to. Ask more people about the podcast, I guess.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, yeah, I think that's great. And I think it also can help, like, after someone listens to the podcast, maybe it's a good way to have a conversation about what's being discussed and all that. But I think that's a good idea. I'm thinking to work with people that have newsletters or blogs and events, but I haven't thought about podcasts, so I probably should also start working with. people that run podcasts with you and see how we can collaborate and help each other.
DAVID HILL
That would be really cool. So if people want to get involved and find ways to help on the Ruby User Podcast, what would you recommend?
JAVIER CERVANTES
I think the most important one is to people join and just participate. I think posting things or... Even just joining and getting the updates every week about what's happening, it's a good first step. But then if you're already there, I think the next thing is start posting things, start commenting posts that other people add, because I think that's where the value is. And I think we all gain from having more people participate on the forum. It's normal that a small percentage of the people participates, but I think the bigger that group is, I think the bigger the audience, and I think we can also bring more people in and make it more interesting. And that's, I think, the most important one at this point, because we want to continue growing and just telling others about it, because sometimes I don't know everyone in the Ruby community, so just telling others about it. passing the voice it's a good way to collaborate and then after that like if you like what you see and you would like to support the forum we have two ways to do that one is the supporters group where basically you as an individual give like a small monthly amount and then that help us keep things running and do more projects and reach more people
DAVID HILL
more projects and reach
JAVIER CERVANTES
more people And the other is for companies. We also have a sponsorship program. So there's a link where you can get the prospectus. And right now we have this founding sponsors initiative that is going to be running until the end of the year. So we still have a couple of spots left to these brave companies that want to invest on the forum, but it's very young. And we're going to be doing different. partnership tiers for next year, but it also depends on where we are.
DAVID HILL
It sounds like you've got a lot of things kind of coming up in the works.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, I think it's interesting because, I mean, obviously I love Ruby, but most of the work is marketing and sales and community building and all that. So it's interesting to learn about different things too.
DAVID HILL
Well, as we're wrapping up, I wanted to ask who else? Would you recommend that I invite onto the podcast to have these types of conversations? I'm always looking to see who else I should be talking to.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Obviously, if you go to the forum, there's a group with all the maintainers that are participating in the forum. That's a good place. But I thought about three options. The first one is like Mark Heidegger's, which he's doing a lot of open source and he also runs a meetup in Arizona. And I think he is one of the most... active participants in the forum and I think it would be great if you could get him to talk about what he's doing. He's also done very interesting things in the past so I think it would be good to know more about his history and what he's been doing over these last several years in Ruby. The other one is Thomas Cannon. He's also in the forum and I don't know him personally but I saw a talk he gave recently about how to grow the GoWeek community and how to invest in yourself to make sure you keep learning and growing. So I think it would be great for him to get more deep into that. And he also keeps like an index of several articles and guides in his website that I guess there's a lot of things to talk about there. And then the final one I think has already been here, but he recently... release Hanami 3 and the whole rebranding of the Hanakai brand. I think there's some interesting stuff happening there. So I think it also would be great to learn more about what's going on on that framework.
DAVID HILL
him personally
DAVID HILL
I'll definitely be reaching out to Mark and Tim. I already have Thomas scheduled. He will be showing up shortly on the podcast.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Oh, nice. So that's a quick one.
DAVID HILL
I met Thomas back in May, I think, at Blue Ridge Ruby. And he was so fun to talk to and nerd out with about a variety of things. I knew I had to get him on the podcast.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Awesome. Yeah, I think he'll definitely talk about. Awesome.
DAVID HILL
Is there anything else you'd like to mention about the Ruby user form or anything else Ruby related before we wrap up?
JAVIER CERVANTES
I think it's just an invitation to talk more to people and try to also reach out to new horizons and new things. I think one of the things that I like about the movie community, one is that it's very welcoming, but the other is this idea of trying to do weird and crazy things and just doing things for fun. So I think in these times, I think it's good to remember that we can just do cool stuff and do things for fun. Don't ask permission and just try it yourself.
DAVID HILL
Isn't that the truth? I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. And thank you for coming on the show.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, thanks for having me. And thanks for the invitation. And I hope to see you around.
DAVID HILL
This has been the Ruby on Rails podcast. It was a pleasure talking with Javier today about the Ruby User Forum. To AppSignal for sponsoring this podcast. And thank you for listening.
Happy Wednesday and welcome to the show. I'm your host, David Hill. I recently discovered the wonderful Ruby User Forum and thought it would be a great idea to have one of the creators of the Ruby User Forum on the show to talk about it. So joining me today is Javier Cervantes. Javier, thanks for having me. Excited to talk about the forum and other stuff. Awesome. So let's kind of start there, the Ruby User Forum. How did this project get started?
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, so I mean, I've been working. as a software engineer for almost two decades now. And I discovered Ruby in 2012, 2013. And it always kept a very special place in my heart because I think it is very expressive. The community has always been very open. But then after working on Ruby for two or three years, I moved to other technologies and did some other types of work, working with JavaScript and e -commerce and other types of systems. And it was not until two years ago, approximately, that I came back to Ruby. At first, it was like a desert. I couldn't find what was going on, especially because I knew Ruby when it was in school and Ruby on Rails.
DAVID HILL
Rails.
JAVIER CERVANTES
At first, I felt a little bit lost because, I mean, I had... the notions of how everything worked but i couldn't find the documentation the guides the people talking about things but after a while i discovered that there was a lot of things happening on the ruby ecosystem but it was more fragmented than before and i decided to start just writing about it so i started writing some guides and some compiling links of useful resources and things like that. And I started a site called Ruby Newbie. So that went well for around six months or so. But then, as you know, like educational content and newbies right now are not having a good time. So while I was working on that, I felt that Ruby didn't have an active forum. I found really cool forums for Rust, for Python, for Go, for almost any other major programming language. But there was no access for Ruby. So that's when I said I probably should give it a try and see if we can get a Ruby forum started. And that's when I partnered with Gemma to start the forum at the end of last year. And we've been doing that for almost a year now. And yeah, it's been kind of, well, it all born from the necessity of finding where is the Ruby resources and what's happening on the Ruby community.
DAVID HILL
When I first kind of was told and pointed towards the Ruby forum, I thought it was really kind of almost a throwback to an earlier era of the internet because With the way things have evolved with social media and Slack and Discord and all these other venues for communication, having a kind of an old school web forum. I don't know. There's something about that. It's like, oh, yeah, I remember back in the day when such simpler times.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, yeah, definitely. It feels like a treat to the past sometimes. I think the forums... Everything's slower, and nowadays everything is very fast. You have to be in 70 different Slack channels and 30 Discords. Sometimes you miss important conversations that happened yesterday or in the morning while you were working. And I feel like with the forum, you get this asynchronous flow where you can have a conversation across the whole week. And also you get this summary of what's happening on the forum. If you miss something, you can jump in and talk about it. So I think there's a lot of new things, but at least the way my mind works and how I work, I feel like I'm always struggling with keeping up with things that are happening. And for me, the forum is a place to think, one, have these slower and more asynchronous conversations. And also I think there are some, for example, great newsletters in the Ruby community or there's some blog posts that are great and I follow those people. But I think also these interactive two -way streets know about different things that people are thinking about and just get like behind the scenes thinking of someone that's working on an open source project. I think that's something that we can get with a forum.
DAVID HILL
can get with a forum. I also sometimes feel like we're in a different era of the internet.
DAVID HILL
like we're in a different era of the internet. That makes sense. So how long has the Ruby forum been up and running?
JAVIER CERVANTES
So it started like in a beta in December of 2025. So it's been like nine months. How has the project been going since it's launched? So, I mean, it's been going great. It's a lot of work and it's hard because... Obviously, you have to build trust to have people participating and getting people to know you. So there's a lot of outreach and setting things up and getting content and reaching out to people and stuff like that. But I think we're doing a good job in terms of growth. We're almost 500 at this point. I always try to do a comparison with other active forums on the Ruby community, and we're already the top Ruby forum in terms of the others that are specific to projects like Rails or Hanami. But still, I think we're getting there. I think there's obviously a lot of opportunity to keep growing. I think we've found that there's people that are looking for that title. content and interaction and that's been great and also it's been like a great opportunity to meet new people learn about new projects and just trying to partner together with other people doing cool stuff in the Ruby ecosystem obviously there's a lot of things and ideas but there's not enough time to work on those but hopefully we can still continue to work on it slowly or surely and I think Always the idea with the forum is to build something long term. So I think in two or three years, we'll see. I think we can get to interesting places. Cool. But we're just getting started.
DAVID HILL
And you might have touched on this already, but we were just kind of talking about with social media and Slack and Discord and Reddit. Was there a particular reason that you settled on wanting to create this very old school forum instead of going with something? in air quotes, more modern?
JAVIER CERVANTES
I think Discord is great because it gives you a lot of moderation tools and automation of emails and things like that that you don't get with Discord or Slack. And I don't like particularly, for example, if we start with the chat platforms like Slack or Discord, I think they're great, but usually most of the communities on the free version, so a lot of conversations get lost. in the garden and get deleted forever. And the other part is this idea of searching for things or finding things. It's really sometimes very hard and it's more like immediate communication. So chats have a place and I use them, but I think you can complement that with something that is more like a forum. And the other part is... the fragmentation of the system. So I think one of the disadvantages of Discord and Slack and all that is that you have to log in into all those different things. And it's the same thing with social media. Some people are using Blue Sky, some people are using X, some people are using Mastodon. So there's really no one place where you can talk and collaborate with people across the full ecosystem because people are... posting in different places and it's kind of a way to consolidate things in a single place but it's at the same time like the biggest challenge because one of the concerns is for people to log in into an extra system but I think as we grow and we're able to get more people participating it's going to be more valuable because instead of having to be on Five different projects, you can be on the forum and talk about the five different projects there.
DAVID HILL
Yeah. I've felt that problem before, just the fragmentation of the audience, like you were talking about. You never even know when something's going to explode. A couple of years ago, it felt like there was a huge exodus of most of the people that I knew in the Ruby community leaving X slash Twitter and moving to Mastodon or Blue Sky. anything other than twitter you don't know where the audience is going to move because someone who owns the business did something that was unpopular yeah exactly and you're depending always on things it also happened with slack where a lot of communities were using were getting like the free version and they had infinite chat logs and then they changed the way it worked and now everyone is from the more limited version so you
JAVIER CERVANTES
exactly and you're depending always on things it also happened with slack where a lot of communities were using were getting like the free version and they had infinite chat logs and then they changed the way it worked and now everyone is from the more limited version so you basically lost years of conversations and channels because you're depending on a third party. So that type of independence, I think it's also important to do something up there.
DAVID HILL
Are there any particular highlights that you would like to mention and talk about from the experience that you've had of having the Ruby user forum up and running?
JAVIER CERVANTES
I mean, obviously we try to post things and keep conversation going, but I think one of the most rewarding things is having people come up with different activities and ideas to participate in the forum. One of those was this Cassidy Williams. Cassidy has this newsletter and she posts an interview question each week. So regularly you can... post your answer on a guest or on your social media or whatever. So one of the members decided to start posting each week the question. And it's been great because you can compare the answers with the others and then it's get more collaborative process.
JAVIER CERVANTES
And sometimes we've always, sometimes some benchmarks. So I think it's... The newsletter and the interview question was happening there, but I think it's just another layer of interactivity and a learning opportunity for more people to participate and be involved. So I think that that was one that I think was great. And the other thing that we did the last month was to invite open source maintainers to bring their discussion. So usually, Happens the same thing with most of the projects. Either host their discussions either on GitHub discussions or they have a Discord or something where people can ask questions and do things like that because I don't think nobody uses Stack Overflow anymore.
DAVID HILL
I don't think nobody uses Stack Overflow anymore.
JAVIER CERVANTES
But what we did is like invited different open source maintainers to bring their discussions to the forum. and try to see if that gets some more cross -pollination. So instead of having a separate forum or a separate chat channel, just we're creating tags for each of the projects and then people can ask questions or they can announce new versions or improvements of the gems or the open source projects. And we've been doing that. It's been great. I think there's still a lot that... could be done but i think that bringing people together with what they're doing and highlight what it's already happening i think it's one of the goals of the forum and that has helped us to also get more people involved and participating so obviously we always open to new projects so if anyone listening has a project and wants to bring their discussions to the forum i think it's a great opportunity and It also helps to remove some of the load of having to moderate and sustain and maintain the community on your own. And you can take advantage of the infrastructure and the forum.
DAVID HILL
So much of what I love about the Ruby community is the community. So helping to have kind of more centralized, for lack of a better word, places where you can kind of gather and... hopefully kind of have some of those incidental encounters of meeting people or having conversations you might not have found other places has just been so valuable for me. And so I love having that here.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, I think that is great because sometimes for a small project, it's hard to get a lot of traction or views, but there's some interesting things sometimes happening on the borders. And I think giving them like a spotlight helps. more people know about it and then we can all learn from each other. I mean, for example, right now I'm working on a Rails project and I'm using some of the dry gems to do some validations and do some actions and things like that, that I was basically reinventing the wheel inside of Rails. So I think it's great to know like different tools and things that are happening and you never know. when you're going to need or when you can use something different.
DAVID HILL
Especially these days with AI and everything else that it's doing to kind of our software writing industry, it always feels like there's something else going on, something new that you may have missed or that you could learn about.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah. And I think, I mean, other things that I enjoy a lot is talking to people. And I think right now we're spending too much time talking with the LLMs.
DAVID HILL
And I
JAVIER CERVANTES
too much time talking with the LLMs. And I think we could, spend a little bit more time talking with other people because it's always great to learn new things, share about what you're learning. And obviously it's very fast to get an answer from an LLM, but I think the experience of getting the perspective of someone else that is working on something, that's something that you cannot get there, right?
DAVID HILL
By definition, you can't get that from the LLM because it's not a person. A mathematical average of responses that it's calculated.
JAVIER CERVANTES
mathematical average
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, exactly. Sometimes I think we forget about that. But I think it's just another way to collaborate and meet new people. And we're also trying to partner with existing initiatives of the Ruby ecosystem. So we're trying to partner with people that are organizing meetups. We're trying to... partner with the Ruby events folks that are doing a great job to index everything that's happening on the conferences and middle space. And we're also trying to like, obviously, an event or a conference is a very different experience than being online. But I think we can complement each other in terms like maybe you meet someone and you can keep talking about it on the forum, right? Or maybe... you have a great insight on a talk you saw on an event, and then you can share it with the others. Or maybe you're the presenter and you want to get everything back on your presentation before you present it. And also a good opportunity to talk to others and see what their reaction is.
DAVID HILL
So what's next for the Ruby User Forum? Do you have anything coming up?
JAVIER CERVANTES
We're trying to partner with more initiatives. We have the XO movie coming here to Toronto. Where am I? So I'm excited to meet some people in person and see if we can make some new partnerships and see what we can get from there. We're also having some surprises. Like we have a supporters program and we're going to be adding like more benefits and things there. So I think that's going to be great, but we're still working on it. And the other thing is just keeping by the people, making sure we get more projects, more people, more maintainers. And I think it's just a matter of getting to that level when it starts to be self -sustainable. Because right now, I would say most of the work is in the outreach, content, posting and all that. But I think... If we can get to a point where the effort is more in the maintenance and keeping things running, it's going to be better for everyone. But it's fine. I think we're in an interesting phase because I think we're at a level where we kind of reach a plateau of members and participation. So we need to figure out what we need to do next to grow to maybe a thousand or more members.
DAVID HILL
While you're talking about that, I suddenly had this kind of a thought of like, maybe I should like start posting more on the Ruby user form about the podcast is like announcing new episodes there or looking for conversations about existing episodes to see like ways that I can ask questions or do these recordings in a way that will appeal to more parts of the community. So I might be showing up there more in the future just to. Ask more people about the podcast, I guess.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, yeah, I think that's great. And I think it also can help, like, after someone listens to the podcast, maybe it's a good way to have a conversation about what's being discussed and all that. But I think that's a good idea. I'm thinking to work with people that have newsletters or blogs and events, but I haven't thought about podcasts, so I probably should also start working with. people that run podcasts with you and see how we can collaborate and help each other.
DAVID HILL
That would be really cool. So if people want to get involved and find ways to help on the Ruby User Podcast, what would you recommend?
JAVIER CERVANTES
I think the most important one is to people join and just participate. I think posting things or... Even just joining and getting the updates every week about what's happening, it's a good first step. But then if you're already there, I think the next thing is start posting things, start commenting posts that other people add, because I think that's where the value is. And I think we all gain from having more people participate on the forum. It's normal that a small percentage of the people participates, but I think the bigger that group is, I think the bigger the audience, and I think we can also bring more people in and make it more interesting. And that's, I think, the most important one at this point, because we want to continue growing and just telling others about it, because sometimes I don't know everyone in the Ruby community, so just telling others about it. passing the voice it's a good way to collaborate and then after that like if you like what you see and you would like to support the forum we have two ways to do that one is the supporters group where basically you as an individual give like a small monthly amount and then that help us keep things running and do more projects and reach more people
DAVID HILL
more projects and reach
JAVIER CERVANTES
more people And the other is for companies. We also have a sponsorship program. So there's a link where you can get the prospectus. And right now we have this founding sponsors initiative that is going to be running until the end of the year. So we still have a couple of spots left to these brave companies that want to invest on the forum, but it's very young. And we're going to be doing different. partnership tiers for next year, but it also depends on where we are.
DAVID HILL
It sounds like you've got a lot of things kind of coming up in the works.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, I think it's interesting because, I mean, obviously I love Ruby, but most of the work is marketing and sales and community building and all that. So it's interesting to learn about different things too.
DAVID HILL
Well, as we're wrapping up, I wanted to ask who else? Would you recommend that I invite onto the podcast to have these types of conversations? I'm always looking to see who else I should be talking to.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Obviously, if you go to the forum, there's a group with all the maintainers that are participating in the forum. That's a good place. But I thought about three options. The first one is like Mark Heidegger's, which he's doing a lot of open source and he also runs a meetup in Arizona. And I think he is one of the most... active participants in the forum and I think it would be great if you could get him to talk about what he's doing. He's also done very interesting things in the past so I think it would be good to know more about his history and what he's been doing over these last several years in Ruby. The other one is Thomas Cannon. He's also in the forum and I don't know him personally but I saw a talk he gave recently about how to grow the GoWeek community and how to invest in yourself to make sure you keep learning and growing. So I think it would be great for him to get more deep into that. And he also keeps like an index of several articles and guides in his website that I guess there's a lot of things to talk about there. And then the final one I think has already been here, but he recently... release Hanami 3 and the whole rebranding of the Hanakai brand. I think there's some interesting stuff happening there. So I think it also would be great to learn more about what's going on on that framework.
DAVID HILL
him personally
DAVID HILL
I'll definitely be reaching out to Mark and Tim. I already have Thomas scheduled. He will be showing up shortly on the podcast.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Oh, nice. So that's a quick one.
DAVID HILL
I met Thomas back in May, I think, at Blue Ridge Ruby. And he was so fun to talk to and nerd out with about a variety of things. I knew I had to get him on the podcast.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Awesome. Yeah, I think he'll definitely talk about. Awesome.
DAVID HILL
Is there anything else you'd like to mention about the Ruby user form or anything else Ruby related before we wrap up?
JAVIER CERVANTES
I think it's just an invitation to talk more to people and try to also reach out to new horizons and new things. I think one of the things that I like about the movie community, one is that it's very welcoming, but the other is this idea of trying to do weird and crazy things and just doing things for fun. So I think in these times, I think it's good to remember that we can just do cool stuff and do things for fun. Don't ask permission and just try it yourself.
DAVID HILL
Isn't that the truth? I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. And thank you for coming on the show.
JAVIER CERVANTES
Yeah, thanks for having me. And thanks for the invitation. And I hope to see you around.
DAVID HILL
This has been the Ruby on Rails podcast. It was a pleasure talking with Javier today about the Ruby User Forum. To AppSignal for sponsoring this podcast. And thank you for listening.
