Many people are attracted to Ruby because Ruby on Rails makes building web applications faster.

That’s fine.

But then, when you find out how beautiful Ruby is, you fall in love with the language!

Now the question is…

Is Ruby limited to what Rails can do?

No!

Not at all.

Ruby is a general programming language.

In theory, you can make anything you want with Ruby.

Now:

How practical it’s to make something is another story.

It depends on what gems & libraries are available because these gems do a lot of the heavy lifting for you.

Practical things you can do with Ruby:

• Full-stack web development
• Web scraping & crawling
• Static website generators
• Command-line media player (using FFI + libVLC) & other command-line tools
• Automation, Backup & DevOps tools
• Servers
• Parsing, data cleaning & filtering
• API Clients (like Twitter’s or Github’s)
• Report generators (PDF, HTML, CSV)

That’s a good list!

You can do all of these things & deliver at a production level.

Less practical, but still doable:

• Games (gosu / Ruby2D)
• Data science
• Machine Learning & AI

These you can do mostly for personal projects & fun.

Everything else?

You can still do, of course, but it’ll take a lot more work & domain knowledge.

Popular Open-Source Ruby Projects

I want to give you a list of projects made with Ruby so you can get inspired & see what’s possible yourself.

These projects all have 4k+ Github Stars.

Rails apps:

• https://github.com/atech/postal (Email inbox)
• https://github.com/huginn/huginn (Event notifications)
• https://github.com/discourse/discourse (Forum software)
• https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq (Web-based git interface, like Github)

Non-rails apps:

• https://github.com/puma/puma/ (Rack application server)
• https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant (Developer environments via Virtual Machines)
• https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri (HTML / XML parsing)
• https://github.com/opal/opal (Write Javascript with Ruby)
• https://github.com/Homebrew/brew (macOS package manager)
• https://github.com/fluent/fluentd (Logging unification tool)

There are thousands of projects made with Ruby, but these will help you get an idea of what you can do with this programming language.

In Summary

If you want to crunch the digits of PI as fast as possible, while getting every single bit of performance possible, you wouldn’t use Ruby.

But you wouldn’t be using ANY other scripting language either.

Like PHP or Python.

You may have to go down all the way to ASM (Assembly Language), which is the closest you can get to speaking in 1s & 0s to your computer.

Here’s the best part…

If you want to build a full website, any kind of helpful tool (backups, report generators, crawlers, etc.), or just get started in the programming world & have fun.

Then Ruby is perfect for you.

It’s under active development, it’s fun & you can always find help if you get stuck.

So why not give it a try?

I look forward to seeing what wonderful projects you build with Ruby!

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