It’s hard to believe that December is here. Even more mind-boggling: in the next few weeks we’ll be winding down a decade. This was a tough year. We want to commend and thank all of the developers who helped us maintain healthy projects and a kind community in a year where no connection or offer of support was taken for granted.

It might be easy for any of us to list all the ways this year seemed to limit us. We’d love to offer you a moment to reflect with us on what we’re grateful for in the Ruby Together community.

1. Five years of Ruby Together!

We can’t let the end of this year pass without acknowledging our five year anniversary! In 2015 Ruby Together incorporated as a solution to the dire need for consistent contributors to Ruby projects that provide infrastructure for the entire community; in particular Bundler, RubyGems and RubyGems.org. Five years and a pandemic later… and we’re still being supported by our community. We can’t thank you enough for demonstrating how valuable and worthwhile funding this work is to you.

2. A Source of stability this year

We really want to brag about our uptime. Before Ruby Together, with Bundler and Ruby Gems run entirely by just a couple of extremely part-time volunteers, outages could last a day and even — on a few occasions — multiple days in a row. In fact, a week-long outage due to a security issue directly led to the founding of Ruby Together.

All of Ruby Together’s work has been worth it: as of December 8, we have managed 99.997% uptime in 2020 — less than 15 minutes of downtime during the entire year.

3. Features that make us feel festive

Since Ruby Together launched in 2015, we’ve reached some huge milestones:

  • there are now over 175,000 gems (up from 101,000)
  • there are over 1,216,000 versions of gems (up from 583,000)
  • we have served 64 billion (!) gem downloads (up from 4.5 billion in 2015)

One of the accomplishments we’re most proud of is designing and shipping the compact index that keeps track of every gem and dependency. It’s been the key to faster installs and updates, as well as ensuring that developers get gem versions that will work with their version of Ruby.

At the same time, we migrated all of RubyGems.org to use the Fastly content delivery network, dramatically increasing the speed of downloading gems around the world.

4. Maintenance, money…and maids

A few reasons to be grateful according to our team members — especially if you use Ruby every day:

“[Ruby Together] ensures that chores of keeping shared infrastructure up and running is well compensated and the burden of maintaining a shared project doesn’t fall on a single contributor or a company.”

“[Ruby Together] seems more like the housemaid of Ruby community to me. It does the work we all agree we need to do but no one wants to do it themselves.”

5. Our incredible developer community

We’re lucky that developers we’ve connected with in the Ruby Together community are welcoming and inclusive, and we actively work to keep it that way. We have a commitment to only fund projects with a code of conduct. The most popular code of conduct in the Ruby community, the Contributor Covenant, was created by Ruby Together board member Coraline Ada Ehmke.

We’re cautiously optimistic about what the next year holds. For now, we’re thankful to be able to continue this work and to be a part of your community.

(Extra thanks: Of course, we can’t let the end of this decade pass without acknowledging 25 years of Ruby  programming language. We’re grateful to Yukihiro Matsumoto and the early developers who help make the language what it is today. The world of open source has transformed in massive ways since then. One thing that hasn’t changed: open source is valuable and open source developers deserve to be compensated for their work.)