layout: post

title: Happy 2014!

author: Brian Shirai

New beginnings are exciting and I'm delighted to announce that I've joined a

terrific team of people at [Enova](http://enova.com) who are working hard to

innovate and push Ruby well beyond its comfort zone.

I'm looking forward to sharing the journey with you as we build fantastic

developer tools, migrate giant monolithic Rails apps, and create

next-generation distributed applications that scale efficiently to _all the

cores_. There are huge challenges given the engineering tasks, but also

tremendous opportunities to demonstrate how powerful Ruby is and can be.

At Enova, I'll be continuing my OSS work on Rubinius and RubySpec. This is a

generous contribution from Enova to the Ruby community. I'll also be devoting

time to Rubinius X as we explore and address the many deficiencies in Ruby

that continue to drive developers and businesses to other languages like Go,

Clojure, and Node.js.

For those still running on Ruby 1.8.7, we'd love for you to collaborate with

us as we build tools to migrate to newer Ruby versions. If you're already on

Ruby 1.9.3 or later, we'd love to help you explore migrating from MRI to a

Ruby implementation with a modern garbage collector, JIT compiler, and good

support for concurrency. If you're considering rewriting your Ruby app in some

other language, please let us know why.

If you've already rewritten your Ruby apps in another language, I'd especially

like to hear from you. Rewrites always involve new architecture decisions as

well. I'd like to understand if the Ruby _language_ prevented your new

architecture decisions or if better technology in Ruby would have saved the

cost of rewriting an application.

Kumiko, Miwa, and I will be moving to Chicago. If you're in the area, we look

forward to meeting you. If not, hopefully you'll come visit Chicago and say

hello, maybe at [RailsConf 2014](http://lanyrd.com/2014/railsconf/)!

Happy New Year!