Archive for November 18th, 2008
A Sad Day
There have been some sad developments within the Engine Yard Rubinius team that I’d like to address head on.
Earlier today, I had the unfortunate task of reducing the team size to 2 people, which meant laying off the rest of the team.
I’m sure this comes as a shock to many, as it did to my friends to whom I had to give walking papers. This was certainly never a scenario that I had ever hoped to find myself in when Engine Yard offered me this dream job early in 2007.
The reason for the layoffs is not Engine Yard divesting interest in Rubinius,
but rather a necessary reorganization of budget priorities. That’s a fancy way of saying that EY could no longer afford to sustain the large team we had.
This is a sad day for me, one that I’ve been dreading. It stings not only
because of what it means to Rubinius but also because of what it means to my friends with whom I will no longer be working. They’ve put blood, sweat, and tears into Rubinius and their everyday presence will be sorely missed. I hope that they do not think badly of me or Engine Yard.
When Engine Yard gave me the go ahead to hire a team, they did it with the best
intention: to help Rubinius grow. And we have definitely done that. In the
last year, we’ve achieved amazing goals within the project:
- We went from running very little ruby code to running rails.
- We got rubygems up and running well.
- We got a parser entirely in ruby integrated.
- We wrote a whole new VM to build on.
We’ve had our fair share of setbacks, but the team has always rallied.
Rubinius will continue to move forward, continually bolstered by the awesome group of people who give up their free time to help on the project.
Tom Mornini has posted on the EY blog as well; you should read his take.
