A Rubyist’s Guide to Existential Dread

The rumored rise of AI. A stagnant hiring market. The long shadow of industry layoffs. It seems like there’s always a threat (or three) on the horizon, and even the bravest of us would be forgiven for feeling some apprehension about the future. So, what’s a Rubyist to think? What’s a Rubyist to do? While I don’t have any guarantees, I do have a couple ideas.

1. A Rubyist’s Guide to Existential Dread
2. Have you felt it?
3. Loss of Cra Loss of Livelihood Loss of Community
4. Cra
5. Livelihood
6. Community
7. Loss of Cra Loss of Livelihood Loss of Community
8. “Will I still be able to make a living doing work I enjoy with people I care about?”
9. 1. Don’t Panic
10. Being alive is inherently dangerous.
11. I have been through hard times before.
12. I rarely wish for the past.
13. 2. Cherish Now
15. 3. Create Space
16. Andy Croll
17. Jemma Issro & Emily Samp
18. Dave Paola
19. Bobbilee Hartman
20. Opportunities Someone should help connect local meetups to devs looking for speaking opportunities. Someone should make a Ruby conference geared toward developers with kids. Someone should provide training and support for experienced devs transitioning from other languages.
21. 4. Get Tedious
25. Lucian Ghinda
26. Stephen Margheim
27. Bhumi Shah
28. Andrew Kane
29. "In August, I set out to improve the machine learning ecosystem for Ruby and wasn’t sure where it would go. Over the next 5 months, I ended up releasing 16 libraries and learned a lot along the way. I wanted to share some of that knowledge and introduce some of the libraries you can now use in Ruby."
30. I’m happy to announce another round of machine learning gems for Ruby. … Ruby is getting better for machine learning. Many popular Python libraries now have Ruby counterparts. They can be used in Ruby scripts, iRuby notebooks, and Rails applications. This should make it easier to do machine learning without leaving your favorite language.
31. Opportunities Someone should catalog tools in the Laravel community and build the missing ones for Rails. Someone should find a way to connect outdated Rails apps to available freelancers who can maintain and upgrade them. Someone should write an in-depth cookbook for real-world web scraping and HTML parsing using Nokogiri.
32. 5. Sell It
34. Irina Nazarova
35. Marco Roth
36. Nadia Odunayo
37. Matt Swanson
38. Opportunities Someone should host a competition to build the same web app in multiple languages and stacks with commentary and judging. Someone should make a YouTube show where guests bring a favorite Ruby library and do a guided walkthrough. Someone should start a group to support indie Rubyists learning marketing and sales.
39. 6. Go Together
41. “Community of Practice”
42. Concluding Thoughts
43. Nothing lasts forever, not even hard times.
44. In living systems, growth isn’t what matters, health is. Small is ne, as long as it’s healthy.
45. Ship of Theseus rules everything around us, from our bodies and communities, to tooling and language. Identity is in continuity.
46. Human interests will always require human attention, choice, and responsibility.
47. Going through hardship can help people, companies, and communities develop wisdom and tness.
48. Better to build con dence in skill and adaptability than con dence in market conditions and forecasts.
49. As bad as you think things are for you, someone else has it worse. Lend a hand and make both your lives richer.
50. There’s no limit to the needs of the world, the work to be done, and the ways we can show up and care.
51. “Will I still be able to make a living doing work I enjoy with people I care about?”
52. Thanks