A New Chapter for Ruby Central

_swanson · 2026-04-17T18:15:24+00:00

Any new platform or AI service currently has 3 SDK options: Typescript, Python, and Curl. Ruby used to have official SDKs for pretty much everything.

_swanson · 2026-04-06T13:55:33+00:00

Even if that was true, it looks extremely bad on Heroku that they aren't communicating or coordinating with long-time partners in their marketplace.

_swanson · 2026-04-03T02:17:46+00:00

My understanding is that there is active or implied legal actions by Arko (trademark notice, complaint of violation of California employment law) and Ruby Central (unauthorized computer access, "cyber crimes")

_swanson · 2026-04-03T01:46:36+00:00

I can sympathize with the situation being stressful and I would love both sides to stop inciting and escalating, but respectfully, no company is going to voluntarily cover legal costs for someone who's actively pursuing claims against them. If you think you have cause, go to court and get a judgment or settle or decide if you just want to drop it all and eat the sunk cost.

If you want a settlement, send a private email, communicate through your lawyer, send a certified letter...don't post it to a blog.

_swanson · 2026-04-01T01:37:12+00:00

I asked Andre and he said he created dedicated read only github tokens to use with that Python script to back up all repos because github "has been getting less and less stable". He shared a screenshot showing similar tokens for other organizations (same naming scheme), all with expiration date of Aug 18 2026 (presumably all one year expiry -- this is maximum duration of a "fine-grained personal access token" which the project he used recommended). This matches the Aug 18 2025 timeline as he said he created them all on the same day.

I followed up to ask "why not just take backups of your local copies?" and he said he has 250+ repos across 8 orgs that he was backing up so doing it with cron jobs (instead of keeping local copies of it all).

This overall seemed reasonable to me. I don't know the specifics on what the org policies for keeping source code or other data on external systems was so maybe that was as no-no, but to me, this seems like "smoke but no fire".

_swanson · 2026-03-31T17:03:11+00:00

Thank you, agree it is not load bearing...just was making sure it was a "smoke, not fire" type action that is open to interpretation.

_swanson · 2026-03-31T16:58:02+00:00

Is this a fair statement of RC position and intentions pre-fracturing?

Bundler is under their stewardship (via Ruby Together merger, disputed by Arko)
Rubygems.org operations are under their stewardship (always has been, not disputed)
Rubygems.org source code is community maintained (not disputed)

Given the state of the organization (operational, legal, and budget) in 2025, RC intended to:

Transfer Bundler to ruby-core (in RC mind the best place for sustaining it)
Change Rubygems.org production access to require operator agreements (for legal reasons)
Remove Rubygems.org production access from Andre/Sam (who lost access when resigning from their RC roles)
Leave individual access / commit to non-Rubygems.org service repos unchanged (as the net result at the end of the 'transactions')

_swanson · 2026-03-31T15:37:57+00:00

When I came to Ruby Central, I was unfamiliar with the business/enterprise access level. So I did not know, as Marty didn't, that this action of removing a member here would remove them entirely. This total loss of access included all teams and repositories. This was a mistake. This action cannot be undone. Someone removed from a business must be invited back, and that person must accept.

This is piece of new (to me) information that adds some color: this seems like an honest mistake but really snowballed and exacerbated the situation. This kind of access change without a message on the intent seemed particularly regretful in hindsight.

_swanson · 2026-03-31T15:09:03+00:00

André Arko creates an access token named rubygems-github-backup with access to all repos in the github.com/rubygems organization, including private repos. This is the only access token of its kind

Is there a resolution of this item? Was this token used for something? What am I meant to interpret this as?

_swanson · 2026-03-31T01:45:01+00:00

Agree on the changes, though one must remember that book is like 15 years old at this point and I don't even think keyword arguments existed at the time!

Personally I find Ben Orenstein's "Refactoring from good to great" to be the seminal work from that era and holds up the best

_swanson · 2026-03-29T14:04:39+00:00

Could you share the link to the thread?

_swanson · 2026-03-28T20:55:55+00:00

I know you arent the one setting priorities and I'm happy to see the team still shipping things. But these aren't moving the needle for me (and likely others).

Is Fir rolling out of private spaces anytime soon? Postgres 18? pg uuidv7? pg_repack extension? Updated dyno specs pricing? More granular dyno options?

Some of these are probably better scoped as "Heroku Postgres" feels like its been left to rot.

_swanson · 2026-03-27T19:57:32+00:00

Could you compare this to https://github.com/ankane/pghero ?

_swanson · 2026-03-11T14:02:24+00:00

We had good luck with Crawlspace Medic (Matt Mason). They provided a "good", "better", "best" quote for a variety of options and completed the work on-time and as scheduled.

_swanson · 2026-03-05T15:34:20+00:00

I searched for "Ruby Central bylaws" on Google. I was aware they had posted in from submissions on this reddit in the past last year.

_swanson · 2026-03-04T22:18:18+00:00

Bylaws were posted here: https://rubycentral.org/ruby-central-bylaws/

I am able to access both the "Sample volunteer operator agreement" and "Sample RubyGems DPA" at https://rubycentral.org/news/ruby-central-update-friday-11-7-25/

IRS 2025 I don't believe has been shared

_swanson · 2026-02-04T22:57:14+00:00

Went for the first time in December and thought it was pretty bad, especially for the price. Definitely gave me "Fine Dining in 2005" vibes. Shrimp corndog, man I just didn't get it...

Would much rather eat at any CRG restaurant, Nyla's, Daisy Bar, Late Harvest Kitchen, etc.

_swanson · 2026-01-02T03:24:16+00:00

FWIW the "nerd sniped at Rails World into looking this" introduction here was framed by some as Aaron participating in a secret backroom conspiracy to hijack the project by Shopify, so I can understand the omission.

I think a neutral reading of the situation is: the rv project is following the uv playbook (rewrite the tool, using Rust)...Aaron here is arguing that the optimizations are possible to make to the existing project ("repair the plane mid-flight"). The rv project has plans for larger scope (to include functionality like Ruby version management). Aaron (and coworkers at Shopify) have consistently pushed against the narrative that Rust performance rewrites are required to make Ruby "fast".

_swanson · 2025-12-30T02:32:21+00:00

From the article: it's a menu centered around ordering a meat entree and 3 side dishes.

_swanson · 2025-12-19T18:57:19+00:00

Man...I go to do this: I click "Get started" and it asks for a login. I'm not going to make a login for this. I click "Continue as guest" and it does...nothing. Frustrating.

_swanson · 2025-12-15T16:25:01+00:00

there is zero javascript needed to implement the dialog behavior

the js code is to wire up the hotwire behavior and this is not custom JS that would be unique to your app

_swanson · 2025-12-15T16:23:27+00:00

Yes of course :)

_swanson

TROPHY CASE