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Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler

rubycentral.org

31–40 of 102 posts

Re: Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler

#31
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that market cap is not real money, right? That's like saying that an average American who earns 30K USD/year over 33 years will earn 1M USD and thus they should be considered a millionaire.

You do realize I compared market cap to networth? And networth is not money? Most of an individuals networth is likely tied up in their primary residence and highly illiquid. If you want, you can repeat my math comparing personal income to corporate income. The difference you will find out is not substantial.

Shopify's revenue last year was $4.6m last year, and that's before expenses, so I'd say it's quite a meaningful contribution. But regardless, a $1m donated to OSS is still $1m.

Re: Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler

#32
yet ruby on rails and ruby is in decline. its getting harder to hire younger developers in this field, many don't even know what Ruby is or cares for it.

Seems like its another PHP type of situation, one which companies will move away from in the coming years. Not the fault of the ecosystem or language but simply because it gets expensive and the talent pool shrinks, not a good driver for business decision makers to back.

edit: i really dont understand the downvotes here I am simply mentioning the changing requirements in many companies that used to be on RoR that cannot find enough senior developers with the budget they are used to, to the point that they are moving to a new platform. theres just not enough RoR jobs and not enough RoR senior devs in the marketplace today and it will be far more bleak in the near future. there's not a lot of new minds coming into RoR and thats the talent pool you are gonna be stuck with if you keep the trajectory. Ask any new graduate and what tech stack language they are using, I'm willing to bet it isn't Ruby or RoR. Their attention is in Javascript or Python or more niche languages like Rust/Elixir/Clojure

Re: Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler

#33

yet ruby on rails and ruby is in decline. its getting harder to hire younger developers in this field, many don't even know what Ruby is or cares for it. Seems like its another PHP type of situation, one which companies will move away from in the coming years. Not the fault of the ecosystem or language but simply because it gets expensive and the talent pool shrinks, not a good driver for business decision makers to…

If it's not the fault of the ecosystem or the language then why is it in decline?

Re: Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize I compared market cap to networth? And networth is not money? Most of an individuals networth is likely tied up in their primary residence and highly illiquid. If you want, you can repeat my math comparing personal income to corporate income. The difference you will find out is not substantial.

Shopify's revenue last year was $4.6m last year, and that's before expenses, so I'd say it's quite a meaningful contribution. But regardless, a $1m donated to OSS is still $1m.

Shopify’s revenue in 2021 was $4.6b.

Re: Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler

#35

yet ruby on rails and ruby is in decline. its getting harder to hire younger developers in this field, many don't even know what Ruby is or cares for it. Seems like its another PHP type of situation, one which companies will move away from in the coming years. Not the fault of the ecosystem or language but simply because it gets expensive and the talent pool shrinks, not a good driver for business decision makers to…

If it's not the fault of the ecosystem or the language then why is it in decline?

attention is in decline. developers are paying more attention to other languages that yields greater number of employment options.

it should be that RoR devs get increasing rates as they become rarer but its not, demand is also dwindling as enterprises feel uneasy about banking the future on a smaller talent pool.

Re: Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How did the conversation about doing this start? Who made the case and sold it internally? I made the initial pitch that we should support Ruby Central, but it took off very quickly once senior leadership saw the pitch. Once we got the go-ahead it was mostly worked out by Mike Dalessio (aka flavorjones) and Rafael França for Shopify and Evan Phoenix for Ruby Central.

How do investors feel about this? Being a dev myself and knowing how the sausage is made and how FOSS is the casing that holds it all together, this investment makes perfect sense. But I can also see how investment types would complain, it doesn't exactly look like an investment in the books.

Shopify has more than 5 billion usd in revenue. I don’t think investors care much

Re: Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler

#37
google should do the same for pypy and other python related projects.

going all the way to tensorflow, google ought to have a lot of interest in the ecosystem to mature.

but event the top story today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32002057 - were primarily Microsoft engineers

Re: Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler

#38
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that market cap is not real money, right? That's like saying that an average American who earns 30K USD/year over 33 years will earn 1M USD and thus they should be considered a millionaire.

You do realize I compared market cap to networth? And networth is not money? Most of an individuals networth is likely tied up in their primary residence and highly illiquid. If you want, you can repeat my math comparing personal income to corporate income. The difference you will find out is not substantial.

I'm guessing you wouldn't mind sharing receipts of your donations that certainly amount to much more than 0.002% of your net worth?

Re: Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler

#39
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great question. They have different impacts. That million allows shopify to get features it wants and aligns the project to it's goals. That $2.44 comes without those strings. You can afford more developers with a million but you end up building something shopify supports which pulls existing resources away from current priorities. It can boost or even kill a project.

If you read the post you will see this is a donation without strings as well.

I'm not sure the post cover this. The intent is without strings but the truth is it buys a bigger voice and platform.

Did you hear about the $2.44 I gave? No you didn't.. there was no press release or hn article.

Re: Ruby Shield: Shopify donates $1M to stewards of rubygems, bundler

#40

yet ruby on rails and ruby is in decline. its getting harder to hire younger developers in this field, many don't even know what Ruby is or cares for it. Seems like its another PHP type of situation, one which companies will move away from in the coming years. Not the fault of the ecosystem or language but simply because it gets expensive and the talent pool shrinks, not a good driver for business decision makers to…

If it's not the fault of the ecosystem or the language then why is it in decline?

I actually think it's both.

The language: Tech companies are becoming more aware of the dangers posed by maintaining and updating large codebases written in an untyped language. I know there's a lot of work still being done in Rubyland on this problem but it feels like the horse left the barn long ago. A lot of Rubyists seem aesthetically opposed to types, including influential language stewards. Sorbet is arguably the Typescript of Rubyland, but it doesn't feel like it's taking off to nearly the same degree. (My theory is that the expressiveness required to support a language as flexible as Ruby results in poor developer ergonomics in terms of the necessary type annotations.)

The ecosystem: Rails is still king, for better and for worse. Back when Rails was in its prime, there weren't as many CRUD web use cases that required marshalling lots of async i/o. Now it's a pretty ubiquitous requirement. You need to fetch data from upstream A and upstream B, then combine them to send back to the client. With Rails, the de facto way to do this is to make these requests serially, which isn't very scalable. Hell, even a single call to a slow remote host can easily end up saturating all of your web workers. Like the types issue, there's a lot of work happening trying to make it easier to perform non-blocking i/o in Ruby/Rails, but it seems like too little too late.

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