Today, I am excited to announce the launch of The Gem Foundation.
Its mission is assist contributors in the Ruby community in their task to further the adoption of the Ruby language, expanding the scope more broadly than just one particular web framework.
Because Ruby is more than just a single framework.
Immediately after establishment of this foundation, we have already surpassed The Rails Foundation in terms of dollars donated, as we have donated ONE SINGLE U.S. DOLLAR to Brandon Weaver, who was the first developer to get in touch with the foundation. Brandon contributes to the Ruby community by writing articles on his personal blog, and also runs the Ruby Learning Center Discord.
The Gem Foundation has also donated TWO U.S. DOLLARS to Jared White, who is a contributor to the Bridgetown site generator.
The Gem Foundation is also contributing $25/USD a month towards the Hanami web framework. If you would like there to be real competition in the Ruby web framework sphere, I would encourage you to do the same.
That’s $28USD already donated by the Gem Foundation!
UPDATE: Kieran Andrews from Adelaide (and of Active Rails fame) has also donated $30USD to the Pry gem, bringing The Gem Foundation’s donation total up to $58USD!
UPDATE #2: As it’s now the 1st of December, a payment of $35USD has been made to the Hanami organisation on GitHub. This brings our total donations almost to $100!
UPDATE #3: As it’s now the 1st of February, yet another payment of $35USD has been made to the Hanami organisation on GitHub. This brings our total of donations up to $173.
UPDATE #4: As it’s now the 1st of March, yet another payment of $35USD has been made to the Hanami organisation on GitHub. This brings our total of donations up to $208.
UPDATE #5: As it’s now the 1st of April, yet another payment of $35USD has been made to the Hanami organisation on GitHub. We have also donated $75 to other members of the Ruby community for their work on open source projects, with a remaining $125 “prize pool” for further pull requests for code or documentation work. This brings our total of donations up to $318.
UPDATE #6: As it’s now the 1st of May, yet another payment of $35USD has been made to the Hanami organisation on GitHub. This brings our donations up to $353USD.
UPDATE #7: As it’s now the 1st of June, yet another payment of $35USD has been made to the Hanami organisation on GitHub. This brings our donations up to $388USD.
UPDATE #8: As it’s now the 1st of July, yet another payment of $35USD has been made to the Hanami organisation on GitHub. This brings our donations up to $423USD.
UPDATE #9: As it’s now the 1st of August, yet another payment of $35USD has been made to the Hanami organisation on GitHub. This brings our donations up to $458USD. But wait, there’s more!
Roy from AppSignal has donated $1,000USD to the Gem Foundation to be distributed at my discretion. Thanks a lot Roy!
I’ve divvied out $200 of this to Soutaro Matsumoto for his work on Steep and Ruby’s RBS type signature library.
A second $200 was going to be sent to Jemma Issroff for her work on Ruby’s YARP (Yet Another Ruby Parser), but she has instead asked the money to go towards WNB.rb, which is a virtual community for women and non-binary Rubyists.
Another $100 is going towards postmodern who has worked on a wealth of tooling for Ruby, including chruby and ruby-install. This donation though is due to their continued work on maintaining the Ruby Advisory Database and the Bundler Audit project. These projects alert developers to potential security vulnerabilities in their applications, and are incredibly useful!
Another $100 is going towards Samuel Williams (ioquatix) for his work on Rack 3, and concurrency libraries within Ruby, such as async. Samuel’s really pushing the concurrency state-of-the-art forward, and for that I am thankful!
That now leaves $400 unallocated. I’ve got a couple of ideas of where this money could go, but I’m going to solicit some opinions of where that money should go by asking a few more people. If you’d like to share your opinion, you can send an email to me@ryanbigg.com with the subject “Gem Foundation Donation”.
So far, we have donated $1,058USD, with hopefully by next month’s update that being at least $1,500. Unless some other benevolent donor like Roy comes along to sweeten the pot.
UPDATE #10: I had an incredibly busy time over September and October, so I missed the monthly updates. As it’s now November, this means that since the August update there has been yet another three (September, October + November) payments of $35USD has been made to the Hanami organisation on GitHub. This brings our donations up to $1,163USD.
This month, I saw a GoFundMe was started by Toby Nieboer. To the worldwide Ruby community, Toby isn’t much. He didn’t write one of your favourite gems. He hasn’t given the talk that changed the direction of your career. Believe it or not, he’s written exactly 0 books.
You probably have never met the guy. But a lot of people in Australia have. Toby was Ruby Australia’s President for a long while, and in that role helped organise the 2019 RubyConf AU event, and some Rails Camps.
Not only that, but he was the main organiser of the Melbourne Ruby meetup for years. I helped out by organising the pizza and drinks, but it was Toby who did the wrangling of the venue and the speakers. He put in the work to ensure the meetup kept going every month.
All of this work with Ruby Australia and the Melbourne Ruby meetup was critically important for maintaining the wonderful Australian Ruby community.
Since that time, he’s moved over to the US to do recruiting work there. The recruiting scene isn’t going so well with the economic situation being as it is, and so Toby and his family are packing up and moving back to Australia.
Today I’ve donated $200 to Toby’s family to help them get back and set up. Toby helped us. And now it’s time for us to help Toby.
This brings the Gem Foundation’s total donations up to $1,363 USD.
As always, here’s a helpful chart to track our donations:
