Spinel is a cooperative of Ruby open source maintainers, inspired by Geomys and founded by André Arko, Samuel E. Giddins, and Kasper Timm Hansen.

spi·nel (spɪ’nɛl) n.
1 (mineralogy) Mixed oxides of magnesium and aluminium with cubic symmetry, used as gemstones. Some of the world’s most famous gemstones are spinels, which were once thought to be rubies.
2 a cooperative of open source maintainers.

Spinel develops rv, the next-generation Ruby version manager and project tool, and offers retainers for core team experts who can supercharge your in-house developers.

Our maintainers have either created or been on the core teams of the open source behind every Ruby business:

• rails, the Ruby web application framework
• hotwire (turbo + stimulus), the default front-end framework for Rails
• hotwire native, a web-first framework for building native mobile apps
• trix, the rich-text WYSIWYG content editor for Rails
• kredis, higher-level data structures built on redis
• rbenv + ruby-build, the original Ruby version management tools
• rubygems, the Ruby standard library package manager
• bundler, the Ruby standard library dependency manager
• rubygems.org, the Ruby language package registry

A Spinel retainer offers companies direct access to our expertise, helping them efficiently solve their problems while increasing the sustainability of Ruby open source.

If you’re building your business on open source technology, you

1. want it to be sustainably and predictably maintained; and
2. need occasional access to expertise that would be blisteringly expensive¹ to acquire and retain.

Getting maintainers on retainer solves both problems for a fraction of the cost of a fully-loaded full-time engineer. From the maintainers’ point of view, it’s steady income to keep doing what they do best. It’s a great deal for both sides.

If you’re interested in a retainer, drop us a note at hello@ this domain.

The Maintainers

André Arko helped create the Ruby dependency manager Bundler in 2009 and has led the team of maintainers working on Bundler and RubyGems.org since 2014. As a fan of the Ruby language, he wrote The Ruby Way, 3rd Edition for Addison-Wesley. Outside of open source, he has spent the last 15 years consulting on tools and processes to make software teams safer, faster, and more productive.

Kasper Timm Hansen was on the Rails core team from 2016-2022, is the top 14th contributor, authored major features and reviewed & merged thousands of contributor pull requests. These days Kasper’s focus is on helping teams upskill, as well as Domain Modeling for Rails apps — including inventing the riffing technique to do so. Kasper still pushes Rails forward with gems like Oaken, ActiveRecord::AssociatedObject, ActiveJob::Performs, and ActionController::StashedRedirects.

Sam Stephenson is a veteran Rubyist and member of the original Rails core team. He created Prototype.js, the Pow development server, and rbenv and ruby-build to manage Ruby versions. Later, he led development of the Trix rich text editor and Stimulus Javascript framework. He also invented the technology behind Turbo and Hotwire Native. In 2024, Sam released N₁₀, a Mac app to help people stay focused on short-term goals while they work. He lives in Mexico City where he likes to feed the squirrels.

Samuel Giddins has spent the past decade building production-grade software supply chain tooling for multiple different language ecosystems. Besides being the security lead for RubyGems, Samuel has contributed to projects such as Sigstore, Bazel, and CocoaPods over the years. Samuel has spent enough time optimizing CI systems to be able to parse YAML in his head. Away from the computer, you can find Samuel skiing, traveling, and eating, often simultaneously.

We’d love to hear from you. You can reach us at hello@ this domain.