Hey all, I'm Sean, the founder of Ruby for Good!

Excited to see this posted. We'd previously shared it in a few Slacks and were planning a larger announcement after the long weekend, but since someone beat us to it, we've opened up the early-bird registrations we were saving for Tuesday.

The Ruby for Good in-person event is absolutely not a hackathon. It's a friendly gathering of OS maintainers where we work on existing projects (some have been running for over 10 years!) and kick off new ones. We don't code into the night and burn folks out, either. We have a hard stop every day when we break for dinner. The evenings are reserved for karaoke, conversations and s'more-making around the campfire, board games, and all the other fun nerdery that happens when you get a group of awesome folks together. Really, the best way to think of the event is as "nerd camp for good." Everyone leaves having made a bunch of new close friends.

That's partly because helping non-profits is only part of the RfG mission. The other parts are growing the tech community and helping folks level up, regardless of skill level.

For people interested in attending this year: we'll be working on existing projects as well as kicking off several new ones. With ACA subsidies going away and the number of nonprofits reaching out to us, our focus area this year is healthcare. We'll be launching a project with an Ohio/Illinois nonprofit that works with pediatric cancer patients and their families, another in Virginia that works with cancer caregivers, and a Maryland nonprofit focused on mental health.

If you can't make it, almost all our projects are on GitHub and run year-round, so feel free to grab an issue!

The actual Ruby for Good website has more information: https://rubyforgood.org/

I’m glad to see conferences like this exist. It creates dedicated space for these focuses and the people who care passionately about them.

I'm curious, what companies are sponsoring this Hackathon (if any)? It'd be good to know if there are any tech companies that legitimately stand for good in the world in 2026.

Hackathons can be a blast. That said, it usually takes extra effort to productionize-a-thing after the initial hackathon effort.

Hope to see a follow-up post on what was built!

I volunteered a few years ago and had a great experience.

Why does Ruby still have this artisinal aura to it, never seen C/C++ For Good gathering.

> an annual event happening this year in the Washington DC area where programmers from all over the globe get together over a long weekend to build and contribute to projects that help our communities

Or, just write code for a project - and add useful documentation to it. This is probably more relevant than overpriced hackathons.

The only programming language I know of that is obsessed with trumpeting its own moral virtue. "Matz is nice so we are nice," "Ruby for good," dragging DHH, etc.

Meanwhile the Ruby Central and whytheluckystiff debacles show it to be anything but.

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