Ryan Bates is getting married on Saturday. His work at Railscasts.com has had a major impact on many people's lives, helping many developers learn and master the Ruby on Rails web framework.
My name is Miles, a friend of Ryan's. I'm attending the wedding and reception, and would like to share with the guests the impact Ryan's work has had on the world. Ryan is a really quiet guy, and even his closest family are not aware on how much he has helped others build amazing things.
Do you have something you'd like to relay to Ryan and his family? Has your life been affected by Railscasts? Please share in the comments. I'll try to share as many of your comments at the reception, and see if I can have the speech recorded, then post the video back here.
EDIT: Wow, the outpouring here is incredible! Please keep them coming, and I'll collect them all to give to the family.
EDIT#2 (Friday, July 7/17): I attended the rehearsal this afternoon. They will not be having an open mic at the reception, however I did speak at length with Ryan's family (his mom, dad, sisters, and fiancee) and told them about the feedback on this thread. I will be checking here Saturday afternoon for any final thoughts, and at the wedding reception I'll see if I can record a message for you all from the bride & groom. Thanks, everyone!
EDIT#3 (Saturday, July 8/17): Wedding was great. Ryan and his new wife were too busy to be able to record a message, but I'll hit him up later when he returns from his honeymoon. Thank you to everyone, including David Heinemeier Hansson who sent the following message through email:
>*"Ryan's work on RailsCasts has helped so many people level up their Rails skills in the founding tradition of the framework: Show don't tell! Forever grateful for the contribution to our community." - DHH*
He’s helped so many people, thanks and have fun!
Congratulations, Ryan! Your work helped me figure out how to work with Rails, it helped me improve my skills with Rails, and it helped me level up at Rails. I still go back to Railscasts videos when I need to brush up on something I haven’t done in a while. I’m a teacher and a tech guy, and I know a great teacher when I see one. You are the real thing. I hope your life with your new partner is beautiful and happy. I wish you nothing but the best in this new chapter.
I know people who now run multi-million dollar companies who used Railscasts when learning Rails. I’d guess the impact of his work could be measured in the tens of millions easily.
Be blessed for all of his hard and good work! Congratulation for starting a new journey!
I learnt much of Rails through Railscasts. It gave me the skills to get a job I loved and thanks to that I am now able to provide for my wife and son. Ryan will not know who I am but he enabled me to not only improve my own life but that of my family. Thank you.
Mostly in the Node/JS world now, but got into development through Rails and Railscasts. Probably wouldn’t have persisted if it wasn’t for Ryan’s easy-going style and great tutorials! Congratulations Ryan and thanks for the work you do for the community!
Ryan, your tutorials and advice helped when nothing else could. I had a difficult time understanding major parts of rails, even though I firmly grasped Ruby at its core. Without you I think many things never would have been created. Companies exist solely because of your hard work and that is saying something. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors.
Ryan Bates is the Jesus Christ of Rails: world famous: everybody around the world comes to him to hear him teach, and to worship – he is the living embodiment of the perfect rails developer.
Ryan, when you kiddos decide to have your first child, if a girl, name her Ruby.
I think a testament to Ryan Bates’ work is that it was completely unnecessary for the OP to write
> Ryan Bates of Railscasts.com is getting married
The following would have sufficed:
> Ryan Bates is getting married
We all know who he is and we’re all indebted to him for his work.
May he have a lifetime of love and happiness 😀
After Hurricane Katrina, I gave up on my childhood dream to write software for a living. With no college degree, I was coasting through life and unhappy with my lack of direction.
Then I discovered the Rails community and, notably, Ryan’s Railscasts. Ryan taught me real world problems and solutions that I used to get my first job as a software engineer. I sounded smart in the interview thanks to Ryan, and have since gone on to work @ Facebook and now Disney.
Ryan gets credit not only for the things he taught me, but for the example he set for others in the community on how to nurture budding engineers. If I could be there, I would raise a glass to one of the best teachers I’ve ever had.
You often see posts about, “how can I improve the world around me?”. The top answer is almost always, “start a business that provides well paying jobs”.
There are a lot of businesses out there running rails, generating revenue. Before his hiatus, railscasts was the go-to for learning about the framework. Ryan definitely enables these businesses to hit the road running and create positive value in the world. By extension Ryan helped make the world a better place, without a doubt. He definitely helped me become the developer I am today.
Congratulations Ryan!
Even fairly non-technical people will ask to this day, “Can your documentation be like Railscasts?”
“hi im ryan for another episode of railscasts and in this episode we’re going to be…”
congrats to everyone there!
Thank you for RailsCasts and congratulations on your big day!
Always admired his work ethic. He would pump out video after video, so much research would go into each one, all so consise and well organised and well spoken. Very, very few screencasters are on his level.
I once called him the Bob Ross of programming on twitter and he said it was his greatest compliment. There was something about his tone and patience that made it seem effortless and soothing. I always appreciated that.
I’m still after all these years telling my friends wanting to learn RoR that they should go to one single source and that’s Ryan Bates’ screencasts. They are now legendary.
I cannot overstate how significant of an impact railscasts had on my career. Watching railscasts is what inspired me to learn ruby and rails. I would likely not have become a rails developer without Ryan’s work. I really miss watching his weekly videos.
tell him i feel like i owe him money.
His work is awesome! Tell him railscast is awesome, and be happy and I am very grateful for his work.
Ryan’s work via Railscasts taught me a lot about Rails, but more importantly the problems that we need to solve and how to do so. He taught me how to be a good developer and was the first provider of screencasts of any type that had any meaningful value to me. Plus, he helped me fall in love with Rails. His enthusiasm was infectious
Ryan did so much for me, my career and my family with his videos that I can’t ever thank him enough. If I had the money I would pay for his honeymoon. Tell Ryan his impact on the world is bigger than he can imagine and it’s going to trickle down for generations. Big hug from me and my entire family!
I made an awesome website that I’m super proud of using rails, thanks to RailsCasts. Sorry I went to YouTube for a bunch of RailsCasts Pro videos though!
Railscasts was extremely helpful for me learning Ruby, Rails, and modern web development. After a couple years of learning and watching Railscasts, I got a job doing Rails development which was a major step in my career. Beyond that, Ryan always seemed like an incredibly kind person and his interactions with others have clearly resulted in a huge amount of love and gratitude for him.
I live in Chile (we speak Spanish, so we don’t say “yay”). After discovering Railscasts, we started to say “yay” everytime our code worked.
Please say thanks to that good man!
Ryan’s work helped me build and sell my first web app that got to 100k+ users. I’d often have no clue how to build certain features, so I’d go on to RailsCasts to get Ryan’s take on it.
I’ve made my living for over 5 years now as a dev and I have Ryan to thank for helping me learn and build. Probably the best money I’ve ever spent.
Hello @grandlap. We are from Phusion and are very grateful to Ryan. Instead of writing a message, we thought it would be more fun to congratulate him with a screencast. Could you pass it to him? https://vimeo.com/224951588/debfb619f4