Ask any new Ruby developer what their favorite thing about Ruby is, and they’ll inevitably mention the smooth experience of Rubygems. Initially created as a quick weekend hack, it quickly took the Ruby community by storm, and there are now more than 10,000 Ruby libraries packaged up as Rubygems. In this talk, Yehuda Katz covers how the Gem bundler solves many of the problems involved in using Rubygems in large projects, including some of the details of how it works. He also demonstrates the practices gem authors can use when they create packages to mitigate some of these problems. Finally, he makes some long-term proposals for the Rubygems system that will shore it up as it comes under increasing stress by the number of developers using it and the number of packages in use.
