When you choose to work with opinionated software, passion comes with the territory. Rails developers in particular are a passionate bunch. And in many ways the Rails community mirrors the personality of Rails. They care about writing beautiful code. They care about getting their application on the web as soon as it provides value to people. They care about continuing to deliver features at a sustainable pace. And they care about being happy while they do these things.

But don’t take all that fervor about web development to mean that Rails developers are self-centered. They deeply care about a lot more than themselves. And at this year’s RailsConf, they proved it.

On Thursday, Pragmatic Studio gave an all-day Rails Guidebook tutorial and instead of charging for it we simply asked attendees to make a minimum donation to a charity wish list. Over 100 fine folks turned up and contributed over $12,000 to charity! This exceeded last year’s contributions by $4000, and we were incredibly pleased with the turnout. But then in typical Rails fashion, the community took this "framework" into their own (opinionated) hands to do something incredible.

On Friday morning, Chad Fowler opened the conference with an impassioned keynote and challenged the 1600 attendees to continue giving throughout the conference. At the end of the day, donations were up to around $18,000. On Sunday morning, Gavin Stark threw down the gauntlet by pledging to add $2000 if the level of giving reached $20,000. It did within the hour and continued to rise.

Individuals reached into their own pockets and gave from $10 to $1000. Companies, including Zaadz, also made generous contributions. O'Reilly had the brilliant idea of "selling" extra t-shirts, which added over $1,700 to donations.

At the closing keynote Sunday afternoon, donations were up to $26,000. Roy Singham of ThoughtWorks graciously pledged an additional $3000 if the total reached $30,000. And it did!

We’re pleased and humbled to report that the Rails community raised over $33,000!

This is simply amazing and everyone should be very proud of the impact you’ve made. But we know it didn’t begin or end here. On a daily basis, Rails developers give of their time, talent, and money to support:

• the growing Rails community by writing patches, plugins, documentation, etc. to keep Rails a productive and sustainable environment to work in
• the online community by using the power of Rails to build applications for non-profit organizations and other worthy causes
• the physical world by using their financial resources, combined with employer matching programs, to support a variety of charities

Indeed, the Rails community cares and Rails is about what you can do!