About Fullstack Ruby

We <3 Ruby 😊

Ruby has always played an outsized role in clarifying the need for a higher-level of abstraction in software development. The mountain of complexity required just to launch a straightforward web app (or even blog!) never seems to go away in our industry.

Against all odds, Ruby has held the line to keep those spaghetti-code frameworks at bay, and the Ruby 3 era has done a fabulous job making the language feel fresh and invigorating.

The modern tools & techniques available to Rubyists today aren’t just for the backend. They’re for the frontend too. That’s why we started Fullstack Ruby. It’s time to fall in love with Ruby all over again.

(If you're looking for Fullstaq Ruby, that's over here. ☺️)

About Jared

Howdy! I’m Jared White. I’m currently loving life in the Pacific Northwest 🌲 and building the next version of Bridgetown, a “vanilla-first” progressive site generator & fullstack framework—powered by Ruby, Roda, & esbuild.

I care about expanding the influence of the “alt Ruby” community (aka the world of frameworks outside of a certain train-themed behemoth 😉) AND promoting the values of vanilla-first, HTML-first web development. Besides my work here at Fullstack Ruby, I’ve written a course called CSS Nouveau and run a lively Discord server all about getting back to frontend basics.

And with the upcoming release of Bridgetown 2.0, I’ll be building out an ecosystem to power subscription-based indie publications so that my own platform Intuitive+ can be replicated by other Bridgetown developers who wish to offer educational products.

Real talk: I see a lot of conceptual overlap between the goals of many in the alternative Ruby community and the Use the Platform™ web community. There’s a desire to make it dramatically easier to onboard new developers, “go with the grain” of the underlying languages & APIs, and take rapid action to jettison gnarly “user-land” solutions whenever there are new features in the core platform. At the same time, I see some troubling tendencies in the Ruby web dev space to ignore modern browser advances and go with solutions either recommended by a particular framework (like Stimulus) or by framework authors (like Tailwind) which simply aren’t the right tool for the job in the majority of cases.

In both those contexts, I hope Fullstack Ruby has something meaningful to say. You may not always agree with my viewpoints, but if I at least get you thinking, then my job here is done. 😊

Technical Bits

This site is built using Bridgetown, a Ruby-powered site generator I help maintain, and is hosted on Render.

The theme is hand-crafted by me using vanilla CSS, and it uses Declarative Shadow DOM to separate presentational layout markup from the content markup as well as deploy CSS Grid.

The logo is based off a font called Marvin Visions. The heading font is Fugaz One by Latinotype, and the body font is Overpass by Delve Fonts.

The icon set is provided by Remix Icon.