About Us

This handbook grew out of three years organizing RubyMX, a Ruby meetup for the Mexican developer community. The lessons here are practical: what worked, what didn’t, and what we’d do differently.

Fernando Perales has been part of the Mexican tech community for about ten years, starting as an attendee and workshop participant before becoming a presenter. He collaborated with the Mexican chapter of RailsBridge, and it was while serving as a teaching assistant at a RailsBridge workshop in Colima that he first crossed paths with thoughtbot, where he now works.

RubyMX started in March 2022 with one speaker from michelada.io, hosted at Bosch Connectory, a coworking space in Guadalajara that shared a building with michelada’s offices. The first event had around five attendees, most of them friends. Today, RubyMX draws around 40 people in person and livestreams on YouTube, where another ten or so usually watch.

Much of the time that went into organizing RubyMX, and into writing this handbook, happened during thoughtbot’s investment time, a dedicated Friday each week for open source contributions, writing, and community work. thoughtbot has a long history in this space: the Boston office has hosted and organized meetups including Boston.rb and Design With Boston, and the company has been involved with RailsBridge over the years.

Other thoughtbot members are running meetups in their own cities: RubyDF in Brazil by Matheus Richard and other one-off tech meetups around the globe.

This handbook is published under the thoughtbot name. The experience behind it comes from RubyMX.