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Hey, what a fun year, you know?

January – Zed releases Mongrel 0.1. Chris Pine’s classic Learn to Program is published. Ruby-doc redesigns. Steve Yegge’s A Little Anti-Anti-Hype sets Steve apart as one of Ruby’s most-heard proponents, proving that Rubyists (aside from being just “nice”) can still be grumpy and drunken and all that. Camping, it’s the little wheels.

February – YARV 0.4.0 comes out. Minero Aoki gets Rails running on it. Ruby brigades are a hot topic.

March – Translation of Ruby Hacking Guide to English begins. Rubyists at SXSW Interactive. Lots of people rip on poor, poor James McGovern.

April – Canada on Rails. DHH says the F-word. And flips the crowd off or something. It’s a pretty serious deal. Later that month: healing.

May – Ruby Inside pops up, suddenly, helping lots of little projects and interesting things everywhere. Google Summer of Code kicks off, sponsoring 10 fledgling Ruby projects. Pat Eyler interviews Zed and then does like a hundred more interviews after that.

Ruby’s Core Team at RubyKaigi in Japan.

June – RailsConf 2006. Railsers shake hands and go nuts. Try Ruby appears in Second Life. Intangible coders made of various polygons go nuts.

The RailsConf message board, a fond memory.

July – Tim Bray starts to get serious about Ruby. He and Sam Ruby descend upon RedHanded. Lots of Rubyists at OSCON. FOSCON, a Ruby-themed grassroots conf, makes its second year.

August – After a year and a half, the new Ruby site goes up. The LLRing is held in Japan. RubyConf-MI. Rails Blob.

London

September – Matz starts messing around in the lab. (:symbol.is_a? String => true) and (String < Enumerable == false). RailsConf Europe in London. I get to meet Chris Neukirchen and Hampton Caitlin gives a talk with a nice, tall beer in his hand. Aaron Patterson opens up his webcam and BetaBrite to remote hacking.

October – RubyConf 2006 and the subsequent Denver Accord. Rails gets UTF-8. Lots of speculation about Ruby’s future that keeps the blogs busy for awhile—InfoQ summarizes.

November – Spanish and Polish translations of the Ruby site open. Piles of other languages start translation teams. Avi writes smalltalk.rb whilst a blizzard of work transpires on Rubinius.

December – The Ruby team moves to Subversion. Zed Shaw starts a mission to win a popularity contest and he wins!! He was just so stunning in the eveningwear portion of the pageant!!

I hope this isn’t too glad-handed or self-congratulatory so far. I’m just playing historian for a bit.

So, I asked a bunch of various Rubyists to give me a single sentence (a moment, a bit of code, a hiccup, whatever) that represents this year to them. If I didn’t ask you, it’s probably because I got tired of hunting down e-mail addresses, so go ahead and add your one-liner in the comments.

I get the impression that in 2006 Ruby was recognized on its own merits aside from Rails. Marcel Molina, Jr

YARV.sub(/Yet Another/, ‘The’) Sasada Koichi

This year Ruby got more awesome. Chris Wanstrath

Ruby this year was a further spreading; I’m happy many people got interested in it. Urabe Shyouhei

The joy which is Ruby attacked me this year; it was everywhere like a herd of pigs negotiating a river of fire. Bil Kleb

Ruby shared its power and shed its light throughout 2006 — with a big surge in book publication, numerous conferences around the world, users group meetings, forum posts, and coding activities of all sorts — as it will, with any luck, for years to come! David Alan Black

diamonds
on a red dirt path
a shell
in the mountains
but we aren’t at war. Evan Weaver

There was no computer magazine in which “Ruby” (as well as Matz) was not seen here in Japan. Daigo Moriwaki

A gold rush is coming to an end, leaving part of the original excitement behind, and even though new (and some half-abandoned) deposits show great promise, mining them will prove hard. Mauricio Fernandez

begin; Ruby.extend(World) ensure defined? MINASWAN end James Edward Gray II

ruby code—
beautiful like the sun
don’t look too closely. Zed Shaw

2006 was the year Ruby brought the joy of programming back to the adventurous, the creative, the kind, and the brave, in the greatest numbers since the Commodore 64. Peter Cooper

July/August: Arrived in Netherlands, visited Chicago, started a blog, and had a baby; both doing well. Dr Nic Williams

300 blogs, 25 books, 7 interpreters, 5 conferences, but still just one Ruby. Pat Eyler

At the beginning of the year I hoped Ruby would change my life. With my move to Sun and the progress we’ve made on JRuby, I can safely say it’s exceeded my wildest expectations. Charles Oliver Nutter

If anything is secret, it’s just because I haven’t thought of it yet. Geoff Grossenbach (quoting Sam Stephenson)

map.resources :posts Jamis Buck

Our little challenger has become the incumbent, the bleeding edge took a few steps forward, and a lot of us that usually pride ourselves on staying ahead of the game are starting to realize that Ruby is becoming the game. Chad Fowler

release lecture release consult release overwhelmed release conference release. Ryan Davis

Ruby in 2006: A catalyst for both personal and professional change. James Britt

Do it for yourself. David Heinemeier Hansson

An immortal shot of DHH, Matz and Babie doing a tribute to some cat guy who poses like an airplane.

2006 was the year Ruby turned from implementation to a language, JRuby grew up and ran Rails, and Rails grew bigger. Ola Bini

Struck out on my own and actually paid bills with rails work, launched a few cool OSS apps, and made a lot of great contacts in the rubyverse both offline and online. Rick Olson

A shiny new Web site, the Ruby job market growing by leaps and bounds, a ton of new Ruby libraries and projects—what’s next? John W. Long

This year featured documentation and automation with a fair bit of destruction on the side… next year I will bring the Ruby community automated destruction. Eric Hodel

Hurry! It’s leaving!
All aboard the ruby train
for gorgeous bytecode. Evan Phoenix

Suddenly, we are not alone. MenTaLguY

And we’ll offer matz a more spacious portion, you know?

2006 is the year of acceptance, the year of social movement. We do little in making the language better this year. But many have found its goodness we’ve already made, and rushed toward joy of programming. It is good thing. I expect this social movement continues in 2007 too. I hope we can get technical advancement as well in the next year. matz