Welcome to your first State of Hanami update! 🌸

There’s plenty going on around Hanami. With these updates, I want to make it easy for everyone in the community to keep up. We’ll share our recent achievements, as well as our plans for what’s coming next.

We’ll bring you these updates twice a year. This one is special, though, because we get to cover all of 2024!

Two major releases

2024 was a big year for Hanami. We made two major releases:

  • Hanami 2.1 in February, introducing our view layer and frontend assets support.
  • Hanami 2.2 in November, introducing our database layer as well as operations.

Two years after we brought you Hanami 2.0, our vision for full stack Hanami apps is now complete! This is a watershed moment for Hanami. With 2.2, we give you every essential for building your apps, while providing ourselves a solid foundation for the future of the framework.

New leadership

In April we managed a smooth transition of project leadership, with Luca Guidi retiring and myself taking on the role of lead. I’m happy to be here!

An expanded contributor group

This year we welcomed a number of folks to our contributors group:

  • Sean Collins, a long-time Hanami team member who is back with a bang! Sean has worked a lot across our CLI, and has a great eye for the overall developer experience.
  • Adam Lassek, one of the world’s leading experts in both dry-system and ROM, as well as how we bring the two of them together in Hanami. We couldn’t have built our database layer in 2.2 without Adam’s help.
  • Marc Busqué, who built dry-operation from scratch for Hanami 2.2. This is a gem I’ve wanted to exist for years, and I’m so excited it’s now part of our stack.
  • Kyle Plump, who brings great energy and is ready to help with issues of all kinds.
  • Aaron Moodie, the designer behind our shiny new welcome screen, and our soon-to-be shiny new website (more on this later!).

We’ve also enjoyed continued help from users and contributors Paweł Świątkowski, Sven Schwyn, Pat Allan, as well as Damian C. Rossney who brought us this especially amazing router fix.

Thank you to these fine humans above, and to everyone else who has contributed to Hanami in 2024!

To make contributions easier in the future, we plan to clarify what it means to join and be a part of Hanami’s contributor group, and provide an easier onramp by curating a range of “good first issues” across our repos.

Out in the world

We took Hanami out into the world:

  • In April, I ran Ruby in Common in Sydney, an experimental unconf for experimentally-minded Rubyists, and introduced Hanami as part of the proceedings.
  • In July, I spoke at RedDotRubyConf in Singapore.
  • In November, Sean gave an introductory workshop at RubyConf in Chicago. Sean will soon bring these teaching to you in the comfort of your own home: sign up here!
  • Also at RubyConf, I represented Hanami at the hack day, helping four new people make their first contributions!

Plans for 2025

As we enter 2025, we’ll be working towards some new kinds of goals for Hanami. We’ve spent years focused on framework development to get to 2.2. Now that we’re here, we can direct our energy towards sharing everything we’ve built together!

To this end, we’ll enter the year with three major goals:

  • Unify and relaunch our ecosystem. We’re going to merge Hanami with dry-rb and ROM. One group of gems, one group of maintainers, and one compelling collection of tools for Rubyists of all stripes. As part of this, we’ll establish new branding, launch a new website, and resurrect our mailing list. We’ll also create an easier onramp for new contributors.
  • Help our users be more successful with Hanami. We’ll share more examples of how to build with Hanami, expand our docs, streamline Hanami’s deployment story, and improve our developer experience wherever we can.
  • Fundraise for sustainable maintenance. We’ll work with businesses and individuals to establish at least one day per week of paid maintenance of Hanami, dry-rb and ROM. This is a small step for Hanami, but a giant leap for the long-term sustainability of our ecosystem.

We’ll share more on each of these goals as we embark on them in earnest.

Join us!

That’s your State of Hanami for December 2024! Thank you for reading. 🙇🏻‍♂️

I’m very proud of what we’ve built together this year, and incredibly excited for everything we’re going to do next.

We’d love you to join us! We encourage you to try Hanami for your apps, contribute some code or writing, or even financially support our project.

To get in touch with us, come say hi on our forum — here you join us for chat as well as long-form discussions.

You can also keep up by subscribing to our blog or following us on Mastodon or Bluesky. You’ll be the first to know as we make each new step in 2025.