Why I Still Love Ruby

After 15 years of building products, I've worked with many languages—JavaScript, TypeScript, Go, Rust. Yet Ruby remains special.

The Joy of Writing Ruby

Ruby was designed for developer happiness. That might sound like marketing speak, but spend enough time with the language and you'll feel it. The syntax is clean, the standard library is thoughtful, and everything just works the way you'd expect.

# This just reads like English
users.select(&:active?).map(&:email).uniq

Rails Changed Everything

When I discovered Rails in 2009, it felt like magic. Convention over configuration meant I could build in hours what used to take days. The ecosystem was (and still is) incredibly mature.

The Trade-offs

Ruby isn't the fastest language. But for most web applications, that doesn't matter. Developer productivity, maintainability, and time-to-market often outweigh raw performance.

Looking Forward

Ruby 3.x has brought significant improvements—better concurrency, JIT compilation, and static typing options. The language continues to evolve while staying true to its principles.

For building web applications quickly and maintainably, Ruby remains my first choice. It's a tool that gets out of your way and lets you focus on solving problems.

What's your experience with Ruby? I'd love to hear your thoughts on Twitter.