After six posts (the announcement, our founding patrons, a field report, meeting Tim and Sean, the Rails elephant in the room, and a cuteness preview), it’s time to wrap up our sponsorship drive for 2025.

How’d we go?

Thanks to your support, we’ve entered a whole new era for Hanami, Dry and Rom. For the first time ever, Ruby has a second framework backed by funding!

Granted, we’re at only 0.2 of a full-time role, but a start is a start! We’re here for the long haul, and going from 0 to something is one of the most important jumps we will make.

We have you—the Ruby community—to thank for this.

Thank you especially to Mike Perham and Sidekiq, Brandon Weaver, Joshua Wood and Honeybadger, Ernesto Tagwerker and FastRuby, and Roy Tomeij and AppSignal.

These are our founding patrons, and without their support, this whole thing would never have got off the ground. They’ve committed $26k towards our first year of paid maintenance.

These people are visionaries, going out of their way to support a brighter, better Ruby. Just look at how Brandon describes it:

In Ruby diversity is our greatest strength, whether that be the people, the ideas, or the technologies we use. Ruby is not just one framework, nor is it just one person, it is a community of passionate people pushing the boundaries of what’s possible not just as individuals, but as a collective. I am happy to continue to fund efforts building upon that vision of the future.

Who wouldn’t want this for Ruby? We’re doing everything we can to make this real.

We’ve also been buoyed by new support from fellow community members. We’ve been delighted to welcome 15 new community patrons via our GitHub Sponsors. These are individuals who’re putting their own money towards Hanami, and together they’re contributing $260/month. Thank you!

We’ve also established a partnership with Ruby Central as our fiscal host. Ruby Central gives us a very attractive fee structure (5% vs the 10% that Open Collective charges) and they have already handled the funds for most of our business patrons. This means more of your money goes directly to our work on tools for Rubyists.

Ruby Central went out of their way to set this up for us, and I couldn’t think of a better partner for this. We share the same vision for Ruby’s future, and I’m excited to collaborate with them for many years to come!

After all of this, how did we go? We’ve raised $29k (so far!). This is short of our initial $40k target, but fortunately, it’s still enough to support me at 1 day/week for this first year of paid maintenance.

We’re ready. Are you?

While our sponsorship drive may be coming to an end, we’re ready to bring in new supporters at any time.

Does your business already depend on our gear? (I’m sure there are a lot of you out there, with our billion gem downloads and counting across Hanami, Dry and Rom). Or do you want to step up and count yourself among the brave few willing to forge a healthier, kinder future for Ruby? If so, then come talk to us!

What’s next?

Establishing our sponsorship was one of our most important goals for 2025, and I’m very happy we’ve managed to get that done. While it did take a lot of time and brain space, we’ve still managed several other initiatives:

Upcoming release:

  • Moving towards a Hanami 2.3 release. Rack 3 support will be the centrepiece here, but this will bring in a range of small improvements and fixes too.

Brand and community:

  • Preparing new branding for our projects, along with a way to bring them together as a unified family. You’ve seen a preview of this already!
  • Building our brand new website, which will provide a one-stop shop for everything Hanami, Dry and Rom. Guides, docs, news, community info and more.

Project maintenance:

  • Catching up on housekeeping. First order of business is rolling out a tool to keep our 50+ GitHub repos in sync.
  • Working on new contributor guidelines that will make it clear how you can become a maintainer, and empower our existing maintainers to take our gems to the next level.

One more thing:

  • Personally, I’ve (finally!) found some time to work on my open source Hanami example app, Decaf Sucks. My current focus is adding streamlined Rodauth integration, something that feels completely “Hanami-native” and can serve as the foundation for an eventual rodauth-hanami gem.

With sponsorships in place, I can’t wait to bring you all of the above!

Exciting stuff is on the way. If you want to help out or follow along, come say hi in chat or our forum!