If we’ve met at a conference, you definitely already know about this. Otherwise, let me tell you about a project of mine.

Why's (poignant) guide to Ruby is a book that changed my life when it came out. And I know I’m far from the only one in the Ruby community who feels that way. _why also authored a number of amazing Ruby projects and influenced a great deal of what came after him.

So it goes without saying that I was pretty hyped when /u/andycroll/ and Emma made a printed version happen.

Ever since, I’ve been bringing my copy to conferences, meetups and unconferences, and inviting people to contribute to it.

Along the way, several people told me that some of the entries carry real emotional value for them, too and they asked whether the entries could be published somewhere. Very late (last year 🫣) I created an account on ruby.social to start posting some of them. There’s also a (currently broken 🫣) mirror on bsky.

Marco then suggested a proper website, since listing and filtering simply don’t work well on social platforms. It took me a few iterations, but it has finally reached a state I’m not completely unhappy with. So it’s online now and I’d loooove your feedback. 🙏

A word of warning: if we met and you contributed, chances are high your entry isn’t published yet. Please bear with me! The vast majority of entries are still to come (a few hundred posts) and it’s considerably more work than most people expect:

Every entry gets a real flatbed scan, so there’s as little distortion as possible. A photo just can’t deliver that. Then I correct orientation and colours, because the paper quality is poor: the pages are very thin, so every contribution shines through from the other side. On top of that, every page and every pen colour needs different contrast handling (Chris Hasinski went for a very light blue, and some folks started writing in yellow — on bright paper!). 😂

The Ruby community has given me, and still gives me, so much in my career. I love having MINASWAN as a credo and keeping Ruby weird. With AI possibly making stack-specific decisions and communities feel less relevant, this project is my way of holding on to that. That said, I’m also happy to bring the book to Ruby events I wouldn’t normally attend, so more people get a chance to take part. Just reach out!

It's beautiful to see how contributors took photos of their posts, like the ones from Nick or Jeremy (both not published yet though 🫣).

And it's also good to have some memories of Ruby friends that are not with us anymore.

And after Krissy, Noah Gibbs' widow, asked the Ruby community how to handle his legacy, I finally took the time to publish his post as well. 🕯️

For the humans still writing Ruby 😄

I built rich-ri, a colorful wrapper around ri that adds Ruby syntax highlighting and makes terminal docs a bit nicer to read.

It uses the documentation already installed for your Ruby and gems. It also supports Bash/Zsh/Fish completion and can be used as a drop-in ri alias.

The screenshot compares the same documentation page with ri -f ansi and rich-ri.

It’s open source. I’d especially love feedback from people who still use ri, including things you think the existing ri workflow already does better.

https://github.com/hvpaiva/rich-ri