Happy 25th Birthday Ruby!

Ten (or was it eleven?) years ago, my friend Topher introduced me to Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Since then, Ruby has changed my life for the better. I have started as a PHP / Flash developer and while I also loved those two languages, the one thing that won me over to Ruby was the syntax.

I loved the fact that it did not need any semi-colons. I loved how code written in Ruby can read like English sentences. I love Ruby’s ecosystem which is so active that if I want to make something, I have to check if it has already been done — and most of time, it has.

Since Topher has introduced me to Ruby, I went on and learned a LOT more. I was basically a front-end developer back then and I slowly added some Ruby skills to my repertoire: first using HAML/SASS, then basic Ruby on Rails (I started at v2!), Cucumber, RSpec, etc.

I am now confident with my Ruby skills that 95% of the time, given a problem I need to solve with a program, I will go with Ruby. I would give that last 5% to depend on the use case, but it will be something close to Ruby like Elixir.

While I have more than a decade of experience with Ruby and I still have much more to learn. I still haven’t tried submitting a pull request to Rails nor Ruby for that matter. The best I could do so far is to help out with spreading the Ruby love by volunteering to do the site for the Ruby conference in the Philippines each year.

Anyway, that is my Ruby story and again, Happy Birthday Ruby! ❤️

P.S.

To my Rubyist friends and readers, please share your stories to the Ruby 25 site as well (Assuming we’re not too late)! Ruby’s actual birthday was on Feb 24, but it’s never too late!