Ruby Central, Inc. was founded in 2001 by David Alan Black and Chad Fowler after organizing the first RubyConf in Tampa. They saw a growing demand for Ruby events and created Ruby Central as a nonprofit to support the community and manage the increasing logistics, from finding sponsors to hosting larger conferences.
Since then, RubyConf has become the world’s largest Ruby conference, running annually every fall. In 2006, we launched RailsConf, the first official conference dedicated to Ruby on Rails. It has run every spring since (with the exception of 2020), with the final RailsConf happening in July 2025.