Ruby on Rails open-sourced July 2004 (DHH from Basecamp); v1.0 December 2005 — convention-over-configuration
Created 2026-06-21
Summary
Claim: Ruby on Rails was open-sourced in July 2004 by David Heinemeier Hansson, extracted from Basecamp. Version 1.0 shipped December 2005. Pioneered convention-over-configuration, ActiveRecord ORM, scaffolding — collapsing the boilerplate of building a web app.
Source: Wikipedia / Rails project history.
Confidence: Verified.
Why this matters for Candid: First-on-the-board entry in the "parts" timeline (Timeline 2004–2014: the decade when each of the three historically-expensive parts independently got cheap). Pair with [[hand-rolled-web-stack-pre-2004]] for the before-state.
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- reference Timeline 2004–2014: the decade when each of the three historically-expensive parts independently got cheap depends-on
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