Hello! Welcome to the December newsletter. Read on for announcements from Ruby Central and a report of the OSS work we’ve done from the previous month.

Ruby Central Updates

RailsConf 2025 is official! 🎉

We are excited to officially announce that RailsConf 2025 will take place from Tuesday, July 8th to Thursday, July 10th, 2025, in Philadelphia, PA.

After nearly 20 years, RailsConf 2025 will be the final gathering of its kind — a tribute to the incredible legacy of Rails and the community members who have been on this journey with us.

As part of a strategic shift, RailsConf 2025 will be the only conference hosted by Ruby Central in 2025. This means there will be no RubyConf in 2025, but we are looking forward to RubyConf 2026, which will take place in the spring and become our flagship event moving forward. This change lays the foundation for a new trajectory that will emphasize more regional events, grassroots community efforts, and more focused investment in open source projects.

We have not yet started selling early-bird tickets, but if you wish to support us, you can purchase a Supporter Ticket here. Supporter Tickets offer full access to the conference and are sold at a premium to help with additional funding for our programs and operations, including our Scholars and Guides program.

You can also encourage your organization to become a sponsor! (Send sponsorship inquiries to sponsors@rubycentral.org)

Read more about RailsConf 2025 and future events here.

Ruby Central welcomes Chelsea Kaufman as transitional Executive Director

We’re excited to announce that Chelsea Kaufman, our Board President, is stepping into the role of Transitional Executive Director.

Over the past two years, Chelsea has been instrumental in shaping Ruby Central’s strategic direction. In this new role, she’ll guide us through a pivotal period of growth and lead the search for our next permanent Executive Director.

Chelsea is taking over from Adarsh Pandit, whose interim leadership has been instrumental in stabilizing Ruby Central and ensuring the organization’s future viability.

Read more about this leadership update here.

New Board Members: Freedom Dumlao and Naijeria Toweett

Ruby Central is also excited to welcome two new board members: Freedom Dumlao and Naijeria Toweett! 🎉

Freedom Dumlao is a seasoned technology executive with experience at leading companies like Vestmark, Flexcar, Zipcar, Wayfair, and Drift. Currently the CTO of Vestmark, Freedom brings strategic insights that will help drive Ruby Central’s efforts to expand the Ruby ecosystem and build stronger connections with top companies and startups.

Naijeria Toweett has a strong background in technical product management, Ruby on Rails, and open source community leadership. Currently a Technical Manager at Girl Effect, Naijeria is driving innovation in data engineering while advocating for gender equality and inclusivity in the tech industry, aligning with Ruby Central’s mission to foster a more diverse and impactful ecosystem.

Our board plays a crucial role in the overall direction, governance, and strategic decisions of Ruby Central. We are excited to work with Freedom and Naijeria to drive greater impact across our events, open source, and community development work in 2025.

RubyConf photos and videos

RubyConf 2024 was held in Chicago last month, and we now have photos and videos from the event! 🙌

You can find all the sessions and relive highlights on our YouTube channel. Perfect for binge-watching over the holiday break!

You can find the event photos here.

We’d like to extend a big thank you to Confreaks for video production and Double Sunday Studios for photography.

Open Source Program

In November, Ruby Central's open source work was supported by Ruby Shield sponsor Shopify, AWS, Alpha-Omega and Ruby Central memberships from 29 other companies, including Partner-level member Sidekiq. In total, we were supported by 191 members. Thanks to all of our members for making everything that we do possible. <3

Ruby Central supports RubyInstaller’s expansion to ARM64

At Ruby Central, we’re proud to support projects that make open source more accessible. One such initiative is RubyInstaller, an essential tool for building Ruby applications on Windows machines.

During RubyConf in November, we learned that Lars Kanis, the maintainer of RubyInstaller, had launched a GoFundMe campaign to purchase a new laptop with a Snapdragon-X chip. The Ruby Central team decided to fund the remaining balance of the campaign, enabling Kanis to expand RubyInstaller’s support for the latest ARM64 architecture.

Kanis has since received the laptop and reports that it’s already a great asset to his work. This investment aligns with our goal of making Ruby development more inclusive, particularly because Windows support is often overlooked in favor of macOS and Linux.

You can read more here.

RubyGems News

In November, we released RubyGems 3.5.23 and Bundler 2.5.23. These releases bring a series of enhancements and bug fixes designed to improve the overall developer experience with RubyGems. Notable improvements include validating the user input encoding for gem CLI arguments and ensuring the--enable-load-relative binstubs prolog works correctly when Ruby is not installed in the same directory as the binstub. Additionally, we updated the --ext=rust option to support compiling native extensions from source and resolved an issue where bundle check could sometimes lock gems under the wrong source.

Some other important accomplishments from the team this month include:

Welcoming First-Time Contributors

We’re thrilled to see an influx of new contributors and are focusing on making contributions seamless and enjoyable.

  • @soda92, a new Ruby enthusiast working on Windows, contributed extensively by:
    • Improving setup documentation for Windows developers.
    • Fixing broken links, unifying documentation, and enhancing the README to better explain what RubyGems is.
    • Adding debugging instructions for Windows, improving RSpec tests, and fixing a bundle exec issue on Windows.
  • @andrew enhanced bundle fund by creating its missing man page and extended his work to cover other missing man pages. He also added a spec to ensure all Bundler commands remain fully documented.
  • @jeromedalbert has been a consistent contributor, helping with issue triaging, documentation, and bug fixes. Notably, he updated the CONTRIBUTING guide link, fixed issues with bundle remove, and added the spec for ensuring command documentation.
  • @marcoroth and @gemmaro made their first contributions by improving the default output of bundle gem.

We deeply appreciate the efforts of all contributors in making RubyGems and Bundler better for everyone! 🎉

Auditing and Updating Vendored Dependencies to the Latest Versions

  • November and December are dedicated to thorough housekeeping to prepare for the final releases of RubyGems and Bundler. This includes updating all development and test dependencies, either via Dependabot PRs or manually, and ensuring compatibility with the latest Ruby patch levels, including Ruby 3.4. Daily CI against ruby-head has also been verified as green.
  • We also improved license management by fixing the weekly automated PR process for new SPDX licenses and updating the license list with the latest additions. These updates ensure a polished and reliable release for all users.

Bundler 2.6: Lockfile Checksum Verification Now Available

In more recent news that we couldn’t wait to share before our holiday break: we released Bundler 2.6 this week with an exciting new change.

  • With Bundler 2.6, we are introducing gem checksum verification in the Gemfile.lock, adding an important security feature to ensure your dependencies haven’t been tampered with. When enabled, Bundler will check the checksum of gems before installation, rejecting any mismatched files.
  • To enable this feature, run bundle lock --add-checkums or set bundle config lockfile_checksums true for automatic inclusion in new lockfiles.
  • Other notable improvements in Bundler 2.6 include better Ruby version switching, improved handling of git dependencies, enhanced security for gem server credentials, and better support for bundle exec on Windows.
  • For more details, see the full blog post. Happy bundling!

In November, RubyGems gained 194 new commits contributed by 18 authors. There were 3,441 additions and 1,360 deletions across 248 files.

RubyGems.org News

The updates made this month to RubyGems.org reflect a strong commitment to improving user experience, enhancing security, and modernizing the platform. Sponsored hosting for RubyGems.org in November was provided by AWS, Fastly, and DataDog.

The following are highlights of what the team worked on this month:

Introducing Organizations on RubyGems.org

  • We’re preparing to release the Organizations feature that has been added to RubyGems.org to help teams and businesses manage gems and users under a single umbrella. The new Organization Onboarding feature will simplify migrating gems to an Organization by allowing users to provide organization details, select gems, and assign roles to users.
  • After confirming the details, the onboarding process will automatically link gems to the Organization, create Membership records, establish the Organization, and remove outdated Ownership records, streamlining team and business gem management.

A Streamlined Profile Update Experience

  • We’ve improved the profile update workflow to prevent unnecessary frustration when a password is missing. Previously, if users updated their email but forgot to include their password, the page would reload, display an error, and require the email to be re-entered.
  • Now, when submitting the form without a password, the page will focus on the password field and display a prompt, allowing users to enter their password without losing any previously entered information.

Improved Control for Yanked Gems

  • We’ve introduced updates to ensure gem owners retain access to critical controls even when all versions of a gem are yanked.
  • Owners can now manage ownerships, trusted publishers, and push new gem versions through a streamlined sidebar view. For non-owners, the adoption option will remain visible if it's currently active. This enhancement helps maintain seamless management and transparency for gem owners.
An iteration of the new limited sidebar view for yanked gem owners

In November, RubyGems.org gained 81 new commits contributed by 8 authors. There were 4,802 additions and 695 deletions across 190 files.

RubyGems Ecosystem News

This is where we highlight other exciting updates made to Ruby infrastructure projects that support our RubyGems work.

Ruby Toolbox

Ruby Toolbox Frontend Stack Update

  • The Ruby Toolbox frontend now uses vite-rails for asset bundling, ensuring compatibility with Rails 8. This upgrade replaces the previous Sprockets/Webpacker setup.
  • During the migration, we resolved legacy JavaScript issues and replaced an outdated autocompleter library, streamlining and modernizing the frontend.

Total Spent

In November, we spent $57,103.66 on development work.

Thank you

Thank you to all the contributors of RubyGems and RubyGems.org for this month! Your contributions are greatly appreciated, and we are grateful for your support.

Contributors to RubyGems:

Contributors to RubyGems.org:

If we missed you, please let us know so we can include you in our shout out!