This article was originally published on.cultbyMelina Zacharia.
.cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers.
Honeypot presentsthe story of Ruby on Rails.
Hear the origin story from the engineers who worked on the project from day one.
He was working on a project and was using PHP, when he got stuck.
David had been following37signalsfor a couple of years when he stumbled upon Jasons cry for help.
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And thats how the relationship betweenDHHandJason Friedfirst started.
A relationship that continues to this day.
It was a perfect partnership from the beginning, Jason Fried remembers.
A year later he was giving advice to Jason Fried.
After working on a number of projects together, Jason and David finally met in person in Chicago.
In 2003, DHH had just started reading aboutRuby.
For him, the most interesting part was that it didnt look like any otherprogramming languagehed seen before.
It looked like pseudocode, David says.
He pitched Ruby to Jason and then started working on Basecamp using Ruby.
Ruby clicked for David.
What he loved about Ruby was the immediacy of PHP together with a sophisticated object-oriented programming language.
Over the next 6-7 months and while he was working on Basecamp, he extracted Rails.
Creating something unique and putting it out for the world to see can be very stressful.
DHH remembers how much pushback he received when he firstbrought Rails to the world.
But the same couldnt be said about the reception from the rest of the programming world.
As expected, this approach gained a lot of followers and a lot of critics.
For Jamis, it was Davids charisma and passion that got him excited about Rails.
These people became part of an inner circle that gained access to the codebase of Rails.
And amongst those people there was Jamis Buck.
He ended up being the first programmer David hired at 37signals.
It was a provocation, Jeremy remembers, and it sent a jolt throughout the entire Ruby community.
The core team
What did the newly-founded Rails community look like?
And how did the Rails core team look after the first year of its release?
In 2004, Ruby was really having a moment.
He wanted to build a company from scratch and was thinking about using Ruby.
Thats how he first learned about Rails.
Soon after, he contacted David and became part of the core team.
But for DHH, that was never even a question.
Open source was essential to Ruby on Rails.
But will it scale?
One of the big criticisms in the early days of Rails was that Rails cant scale.
For David, that was more of a fud than an actual technical question.
Scalability became the mantra of most Rails critics.
How did the core team and DHH react then?
For Tobias Lutke, there was never a question of scalability.
His e-commerce giant, Shopify, is the proof of just that.
Key moments in the development of Rails
For Jeremy, Rails 1.0 was an important moment.
But then, every new release was another maturity chip.
Rails 1.2 was a very stable early release that showed people what Rails could really become.
And then in December 2007, the team released Rails 2.0.
This release brought cookie-based sessions and named scopes.
After 2.3 our toolbox was full, says Jeremy.
Rails developers had everything they needed, and then, a new kid dropped on the block.
Merb came into the programming world as a young Ruby framework that challenged Rails.
Merb showed as another path forward, Jeremy admits.
Evaluating and appreciating all that Merb had to offer was the first step.
Seeing an opportunity, DHH decided to embrace it instead of fighting it.
Thats how the Merb and Rails core teams talked and decided tomerge together!
Have frameworks ever merged together?
That (must be a first), thats a singular story too, Tobias ads.
Conclusion
One thing everyone agrees on: Its been the experience of a lifetime.
Rails really allows you to go from Hello World to IPO, says David.
For him, the community and the codebase have never been in a better place than they are today.
It helps them get started.
Story by.cult
.cult by Honeypot is a Berlin-based community platform for developers.
