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

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

#51

Post by adverbly »

thallium205 wrote: post #33
ezekiel11 wrote: post #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…

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

Same thing happening to Java. Lack of a strong enough pull to get people into it.

If you are learning something new or just graduating, you're way more likely to learn rust/python/javascript as those languages offer something unique (low level speed/machine learning/browser stuff).

Rails used to be miles ahead of the competition, but the competition has largely caught up. Rails is still probably the best choice(in my opinion at least) for building a feature-rich webapp backend quickly unless you've got some crazy unrealistic performance requirements(spoiler: most engineers love to pretend they do, but they probably don't)

But these days there are frameworks everywhere so you can write your backend in whatever you're most comfortable with.

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

#53

Post by mulmen »

zdragnar wrote: post #43
notpachet wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

To wit, a personal anecdote: My tiny company is torn between throwing out our ruby code and trying to hire more ruby developers. Our senior ruby guy is leaving, and the one senior candidate we had accepted, then later rejected, our offer. Of the other interviews we have had, candidates were asking for too much (i.e. over $200k base salary) and often barely qualified as a senior, or were simply too inexperienced to re…

200k for a senior engineer doesn't sound like too much. If anything it sounds like a bargain.

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

#54

Post by tomc1985 »

ezekiel11 wrote: post #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…

There are plenty of experienced Rails devs out there. They don't need to be younger.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

lolinder wrote: post #47
brianwawok wrote: post #26

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.

Your comparison is still flawed. Market cap is the value of the company in the eyes of its investors, which in theory factors in current assets, current profits, and future expectation of profits. You compared that to the net worth of a single individual, which accounts for nothing but current assets. That said, you weren't all that far off. Based on Shopify's revenue of $4.6 billion and an average household income o…

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by canucklady »

Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #11
jacques_chester wrote: post #5

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 is the Canadian meme stock. When I worked there everyone I met knew about them, not because of the product, but because the news loved to talk about Canada's one domestic tech success in the last 10 years. During the pandemic they briefly became Canada's most valuable company, and then lost all their gains for the past 2 years, then did a stock split because it was trendy with retail investors.

They have a ton of terrific engineers but the nouveau riche people from the IPO are largely insufferable, and the amount of reverence for tobi inside and outside of the company is just unhinged.

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

#57

Post by cosmiccatnap »

tra3 wrote: post #52
cosmiccatnap wrote: post #50

They have also laid off a bunch of their employees today...

Link? I see a reference to them firing 50 people since April. They are still hiring aggressively, I'm talking to one of their recruiters next week.

I bet you that you won't. Hope I'm wrong. They just split their stock and it's continuing to tank. Had a friend get his interview canceled today because they removed the position, said it was for financial reasons.

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

#58

Post by farleykr »

jmcgough wrote: post #21

More big companies that use open source should do this or something similar. The dividends to security, developer productivity, etc are probably extremely high, particularly for a company with hundreds or thousands of engineers already. It's such an efficient use of money to give it to the people who already have the expertise to do the work.

Do you think that would cause things to veer back toward a paid model or do you see a third way between straight up FOSS and paid software?

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

#59

Post by ibawt »

tra3 wrote: post #52
cosmiccatnap wrote: post #50

They have also laid off a bunch of their employees today...

Link? I see a reference to them firing 50 people since April. They are still hiring aggressively, I'm talking to one of their recruiters next week.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-shopify-com...

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

#60

Post by belfalas »

jacques_chester wrote: post #6
xutopia wrote: post #2

Shopify is such a good citizen.

We work hard to be. We posted an accompanying blog post about how we see our place in OSS: https://shopify.engineering/shopify-open-source-philosophy

Nice! I especially like “it improves engineering skills” - if an organizations engineers are never doing anything new their skills stagnate.
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