It’s that time of year again. Yes, when we all have the privilege of calculating how much money we get to fork over to Uncle Sam. But, it’s also a nice annual reminder, for those of us that have the privilege of programming in Ruby, that we are the fortunate ones. Last year at this time someone on the Ruby-Talk mailing list suggested that individuals that made their livelihood by programming in Ruby, should do something to benefit the community at large. And, I agree.
So if you’re wondering what to do, how you can help out, in what way you can give back, wonder no more. There are many ways to help out. In the Rails community there are individuals like Jamis Buck devoting a significant amount of time to produce in-depth quality documentation on the internals of Rails. Drop a dime in his tip jar next time you think of it. But Jamis isn’t the only one. There are many other individuals out there that are working hard, contributing to open source projects, and lending a hand in general. Feel free to Pay it Forward.
Perhaps you should consider giving a donation to Ruby Central, Inc. If you don’t know who Ruby Central is, it’s a non-profit organization founded to support Ruby internationally. Ruby Central is run by Chad Fowler, David Black, and Rich Kilmer. They are responsible for putting on the annual International Ruby Conference, the Rails Conference, and several regional conferences as well. At RubyConf 2006 in Denver, Colorado a participant asked Matz how the community at large could best support the development of Ruby and the team that is working on the future of Ruby. Matz replied that he thought the best way to support Ruby was to support Ruby Central, the public international voice for Ruby. Sounds good to me.
Last year I made a commitment to donate a portion of the money I made from writing Ruby code to support the Ruby community at large. Why don’t you join me and together we can do our part to keep programmers writing happy code.
