Welcome to the January 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

Chris Oliver Joining Ufuk Kayserilioglu as RailsConf 2025 Co-Chair

🚨Big news for RailsConf 2025! 🚨 We’re thrilled to announce that Chris Oliver (CEO of GoRails) will be joining Ufuk Kayserilioglu (Engineering Manager at Shopify) as our Co-Chairs for the final RailsConf in Philadelphia, PA. 🎉

Chris has been a cornerstone of the Rails community for over a decade. As CEO of GoRails, he has created essential tutorials to help Ruby and Rails developers grow in their careers. With his dedication to education and enhancing the ecosystem, we’re excited to collaborate with him to make our final RailsConf an unforgettable experience.

As Co-Chairs, Chris and Ufuk will be working with Ruby Central to:

  • Set the vision and theme for RailsConf, making sure it’s inclusive, innovative, and reflective of the latest trends in Rails development.
  • Shape the program content, from proposing tracks to reviewing Call for Proposals (CFPs).
  • Lead the overall planning and execution of the event, helping to create an unforgettable experience.

“RailsConf has always been one of the highlights of my year,” says Chris. “With RailsConf coming to an end, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to help make this a memorable last event. I’ve submitted talks and spoken at the conference in the past, but this is my first time helping organize and shape the theme. I have a feeling we will have some pretty great talks to choose from this year!”

RailsConf Call for Proposals (CFPs) will be opening very, very soon, so keep an eye on our social media for updates. 

Additionally, if you want to relive RubyConf 2024 in Chicago, you can check out this amazing highlight video from our partners at Confreaks. 

Ruby Central Hiring New Executive Director 

Ruby Central is seeking a new Executive Director (ED) to lead our organization and shape the future of the Ruby ecosystem!

In this role, the ED will oversee RubyConf and RailsConf, help expand our Open Source Program, and drive community engagement, marketing, and fundraising to ensure Ruby Central’s long-term growth and sustainability.

If you’re passionate about Ruby, its community, and its future, we want to hear from you! You can learn more and apply here.

Election of New Ruby Central Board Officers

Ruby Central is thrilled to announce the election of four new officers to our Board of Directors!

Our newly elected officers are:

💎 President: Valerie Woolard, Principal Software Engineer at Heroku

💎 Vice President: Kinsey Durham Grace, Product Infrastructure Engineer at GitHub

💎 Treasurer: Freedom Dumlao, CTO at Vestmark

💎 Secretary: Naijeria Toweett, Technical Manager at Girl Effect 

In a year full of celebrations and transitions, we are excited to bring fresh energy to our board and collaborate on driving greater impact through our events, open source initiatives, and community development efforts.

The Ruby Central Newsletter is Evolving

Starting in February, we are changing how we deliver updates to you! 

We’ll be sending you two monthly emails: one focused on our Open Source Program and another dedicated to news about our organization, conferences, community highlights, and Ruby-related news. 

If you’re reading this, you’re already subscribed to both newsletters. We’re excited to have you on this journey as we evolve and grow in 2025!

Open Source Program

December was a slower month as the team enjoyed time off during the holiday season, but we’re happy to share the progress we made nonetheless. In December, 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

Expansion of Open Source Program With Support From Alpha-Omega 

Ruby Central is continuing to expand our Open Source Program this year with support from the Alpha-Omega Project!

This includes adding a full-time role for Marty Haught as our Director of Open Source, focusing on infrastructure reliability, security, and community engagement. 

Additionally, our Security Engineer in Residence, Samuel Giddins, will continue to enhance the security of our open source tools and infrastructure. You can read more details here. 

OSS News changes

This year we’re excited to make some changes to how we bring you OSS news, starting with making our newsletter more concise, to make it even easier to stay in the loop with our team and our work.

Refining our reporting

We’ll be cutting our reporting on monthly OSS spending ("Total Spent") and the monthly RubyGems and RubyGems.org GitHub repo summary, in favor of quarterly and annual reports published separately by Ruby Central. These reports will allow us to provide more detail on how we spend our OSS funds, and a more expansive view into the volume and impact of our security work for the Ruby community. Let us know what you think of these changes, and stay tuned for more to come!

RubyGems News

In December, we released RubyGems 3.6.0, 3.6.1, 3.6.2 and Bundler 2.6.0, 2.6.1, 2.6.2 by mid-December, addressing and resolving identified regressions, and coordinating with the Ruby core team to ensure the new versions were integrated with Ruby ahead of its December 25th release. Ultimately, we shipped RubyGems 3.6.2 and Bundler 2.6.2 alongside Ruby 3.4, resolving several regressions from the initial releases.

The release of Bundler 2.6 and RubyGems 3.6 ****is the culmination of previous years’ work, particularly in regard to the lockfile checksum’s feature that we decided to delay and not ship with Bundler 2.5.

Other notable improvements include fixing an issue where gem info tagged some non-default gems as default, adding a --attestation option to gem push for improved security, introducing bundle lock --add-checksums to add checksums to existing lockfiles and fixing JRuby warnings when using bundler/setup with Ruby's -w flag.

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 December was provided by AWS, Fastly, and DataDog.

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

An update to RubyGems 3.6 and Bundler 2.6

  • This update includes the release of RubyGems 3.6 and Bundler 2.6, delivering enhancements and fixes to improve the overall developer experience.
  • Key changes address minor regressions and stability improvements introduced in previous versions.

Expanded availability of the admin user create button

  • The admin user creation button is now displayed either in local environments or when user signups are disabled.
  • This update ensures admins can easily create new users under these specific conditions, improving usability and access control management.

An update toPasswordsControllerTest to use modern Rails IntegrationTest

  • During a review of a potential vulnerability report, which was deemed not an issue, test coverage for the PasswordsController was increased to ensure robustness.
  • Additionally, the tests were migrated to use the modern Rails IntegrationTest framework, replacing the older controller tests. This update aligns with current Rails recommendations and improves test reliability and maintainability.

RubyGems Ecosystem News

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

Ruby Toolbox

**Keeping the Ruby Toolbox Up to Date and Stable:** to ensure Ruby Toolbox remains modern and stable, we’ve upgraded the application to Rails 8 and Ruby 3.4.

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!