Présenté à Rubycon 2026
Friends, allow me to confess my rookie mistake: I started coding using PHP. I know, I know, the horror! Shame on me. 🙊
But learning to swim in this very primordial soup was quite instructive, because it taught me how miserable life can be:
- Having to remember the ever different order of positional arguments;
- Missing semi-colons causing numerous parse errors (this line wouldn’t compile, for instance)
- No object-orientation;
- Global variables;
- And ultimately, spaghetti code everywhere. 🍝
It’s a wonder anything serious could ever be achieved in such a shoddy language. Cough WordPress cough Facebook
But rookie me was yearning for something grander, so I picked up the pickaxe, found a mentor, learned ruby and was enlightened. Julien, I owe you one! 🍺
Battle-tested gems, code generators, security and testing best practice, code coverage above zero, a vibrant and welcoming community, I could not be happier. 🤩
Or could I? Despite MINASWAN, I still found dissent: bike shedding, flame wars, tabs versus spaces, Minitest versus Rspec, capitalism versus cooperation… Some gems have blood on their edges.
Still looking for a religious epiphany, I first tried to convert to PDF, but it was too binary.
I then tried to convert to markdown, which had a lot more flavor, but it’s being taken over by the agents.
That’s when I found Pastafarians. What’s not to be loved?
- Every Friday is a holiday. No more risky deploys!
- You don’t have to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, because it believes in you.
- You can talk like a pirate! Every day!
- Humane core values, like openness and happiness
We’ve all seen what happens when AI agent drift. What happens when community leader views change?
MINASWAN has served us well, so far, but benevolent dictators for life are a single point of failure.
My time is running out, but before I leave the stage, I have a dream: that you join me and millions of pastafarians and confront racism, ableism, and bigotry every time it shows up.
Happiness should not limited to developers, especially in the age of AI. We need to grow a spine! As more and more areas of our lives are shaped by software, it becomes our responsibility, as developers, to focus on inclusivity, accessibility, and privacy by default.
R’amen!
