Statement of Intent to Hold RubyWorld Conference 2016

This will mark the 8th RubyWorld Conference. As Ruby spreads, we hope to have participants actually experience the Ruby ecosystem.

The software development system has been undergoing major changes recently. Software development used to entail bringing developers into a large room, where they would develop as they intermingled, and this would tend to close off that knowledge and experience to that particular organization. Since the growth of the Web, the use of open source software, like Ruby and Ruby on Rails, has also grown; yet, that has been limited to only use, and the process of establishing a development style has been fraught with difficulties. Despite focus being given to the efficiency of the software under development, the development process, itself, remains to be optimized.

However, as software developers have grown accustomed to open-source development, so open-source development has gradually come to be integrated into business system development. Also, through the growth of services and tools, such as GitHub, the threshold to this kind of new development has lowered even further. Development that stresses the social component—social coding—has even been gaining attention in the development of corporate systems. We feel that, up to this point, the groundwork has been laid to seriously pursue productivity in software development.

Ruby is a language that was originally designed with the temperament and productivity of individual developers in mind. In this sense, it is safe to say that Ruby and its community have come to be more conscious of efficiency in the software development process. It’s been 20 years since Ruby was developed, and we feel that the times have finally caught up with Ruby.

In previous years, the RubyWorld Conference would frequently feature software development productivity in its various. We hope that, with the current focus being on social coding, RubyWorld Conference can serve as a forum for participants to re-consider the efficiency of the development process of software, including business systems.

Yukihiro Matsumoto
Chairman of the Execution Committee of the RubyWorld Conference