Although the circumstances are more rushed than I would have hoped, I’m starting a weekly Ruby news podcast called Ruby Facets. The first episode is already available and I’m using Patreon to fund the ongoing production of the show.
If you were a Ruby5 listener in the past, Ruby Facets may sound familiar to you. There’s a reason for that. Ruby5 is no more. After 7 years, 645 episodes, 69 hosts, and lots of fun, Code School — who’s been producing and funding the show for about 3 years — decided it was time to move on.
It’s not really a judgement of Ruby5 as a show, Code School simply stopped producing all the five-minute podcasts based on Ruby5 — FiveJS and iOS Bytes too. I have very mixed feelings about this decision but ultimately it’s up to us as community members to decide what we’d like to contribute.
I think I still have something to contribute to the Ruby community in the form a news podcast. Ruby Facets will not try to be exactly everything that Ruby5 was. For one I don’t intend on working with co-hosts for now, simply because the logistics of producing the show need to be as simple as possible considering I’m trying to fund the show without sponsors.
If there’s one thing I gathered from working with Gregg, Nate, Carlos, and many others on Ruby5 is that quality and curation matter. Ruby5 ran about 5 minutes with approximately 5 news stories which is a pretty dense information to airtime ratio compared to most podcasts. The show valued the listener’s time and had a clear purpose: keeping people up-to-date with community news.
I learned a lot from the sound quality we thrived for on Ruby5. There are sadly still plenty of podcasters who don’t recognize that if copywriting and proper grammar are not just a nice-to-have on a blog, then audio quality isn’t just a nice-to-have either on a podcast. Both are a reflection of attention to details and respect for your audience.
There’s another aspect I want to infuse Ruby Facets with as much as possible: a sense of community. Although it will be difficult to achieve with a single host, I’m going to try to synthesize the good and exciting things I see happening in the Ruby community. That will require discipline on my part since the show will be biased by my own point of view for now. Thankfully there’s all of you out there with your own opinions and ideas and exciting projects that the whole community should hear about.
If this vision for the show excites you too, you can become a patron of Ruby Facets on Patreon. Monthly donations range from $1 to $5 and I’m very interested to hear your thoughts about the show on Twitter at @rubyfacets. Instead of hoarding news until the show is released each week I plan to tweet and retweet links to stories during the week as I gather them.