When I fell in love with Ruby and Rails some years ago (Unspace turns 5 this fall!) it was David’s framework that got me in the door, why’s eccentricity that made me feel at home, and the rush of a rapidly growing community of almost universally fascinating people that kept me grounded. I can’t believe how many friends I have met through working with Ruby! It’s surreal to wonder what my life would be like today if I hadn’t met folks like Hampton Catlin and Tobi Luetke.
The English-speaking Ruby community sure has had its share of controversies, and watching how everything plays out — sometimes being involved — has been a total blast… for the most part. It’s like a distributed network of creative individuals that are all scratching their various itches with a tool we share a deep affection for.
Well, sometimes if something itches a lot — won’t stop itching, in fact — it turns out that it’s not an itch at all. Sometimes it’s actually a cancer, or perhaps gangrene. In both examples, they can be prevented to some degree; in any case, early diagnosis and response is the best hope of removing something before it removes you.
This whole Rails Maturity Model debacle has been fascinating to watch, regardless of your stance on whether it is good, bad, or ugly. I have nothing but respect for Obie, and I’m curious to see if his itch gets scratched. I see RMM as equal parts “make the community more accessible to new Rubyists and transparent to the entities that would hire them” and “establish Hashrocket as an obvious baseline for defining a quality Ruby development shop”. Personally, I wish him all of the best with that, even if that’s not the itch I need to scratch.
Where RMM fails me is not any fear that Unspace wouldn’t measure up. Everyone involved with Unspace is here for a good reason, and we’re all different. I like how Giles described the fluctuating best practices at ENTP best.
What RMM does not do is facilitate an early warning for the other kind of itch: the cancers and the gangrenes that creep into otherwise healthy systems and take advantage. The Ruby community tries to be so polite that we end up being totally spineless when confronted by a shared threat. We don’t want to hear about our new cancer, think about that slowly creeping gangrene — even though our paralysis to act on things we know aren’t right are causing us harm.
What are we supposed to do when there are people or companies in our community that should be pilloried for their regretful behaviour? There are people amongst us that are, for all intents and purposes, frauds. They lie, cheat, and steal; things most people would consider problematic beyond anti-social Internet troll antics and IRC melodramas.
It’s painful when you’ve personally talked to 3-4 start-up founders that have all been victimized by the same individual. I’ve put a huge amount of my life into making Ruby-backed web applications the obvious choice for new ventures in Toronto, and so it’s beyond embarrassing when people are in visible distress because one of the rare bad apples made a whole bunch of promises, took their money, and ran. Ruby was sold to them as being a way to identify people who were team players at the top of their game. These are people who will likely think twice about anything we as a community promise a second time. That’s a huge shame.
I sincerely hope RMM serves whatever needs it was created to take care of. In the meantime, what I want — the Ruby blacklist — is something that most people are terrified about discussing for fear of social, business, and — let’s face it — legal backlash.
That’s a real shame, because these cancers are eating us.