I had a realization earlier this week when someone I hadn’t talked to in years emailed me. We’d met on a design forum I ran as a teenager in the early aughts. Something he said made me realize just how long I’ve been building online communities:

the forum kinda kept me in tech probably made me who I am today, always appreciated the work you did way back in the day.

like, damn. I’m not sharing this to brag; I’d just honestly forgotten how important this has always been to me.

I think it’s part of why I’ve worked so hard to build the Ruby community first on Mastodon1, and now on Bluesky2. It was a really nice reminder. 🩵

  1. I think I gave away probably a hundred Honeybadger t-shirts to get people to move to ruby.social back in the day, and we were one of the first sponsors along with Mike Perham/Sidekiq) ↩

  2. My Ruby and Rails starter pack is currently the 5th most-used starter pack on Bluesky ↩