May 17, 2026
Stan Lo didn’t follow the conventional path. No CS degree, no bootcamp pedigree, no Silicon Valley zip code just steady, deliberate contributions to the Ruby ecosystem over nearly a decade. The result? Ruby committer status, the 2025 Ruby Prize, and a senior role at Shopify’s Ruby Developer Experience team.
He recently published a candid, detailed account of how he got there and it’s one of the most grounded pieces on open source career-building you’ll read this year.
Who Is Stan Lo?
If you’ve used Ruby’s debugger, IRB, or RDoc recently, you’ve benefited from Stan’s work. He’s an active maintainer of:
- IRB: Ruby’s official REPL
- RDoc: Ruby’s API documentation generator
- debug.gem: Ruby’s official debugger
- ZJIT: Ruby’s next-generation JIT compiler, written in Rust
He’s also the author of Rubydex, a new Ruby indexer being developed at Shopify.
What the Article Covers
Stan’s post: originally written in Taiwanese, then translated to English by Stan himself covers the practical and psychological sides of building a career through open source. A few highlights worth calling out:
Start where your work already is. Stan’s first advice is deceptively simple: contribute to projects you’re already using at your job. The setup cost drops to near zero, and you may even be able to get company time for it. Upstreaming a patch is almost always better than maintaining a local fork indefinitely.
Use AI to collapse the learning curve. When Stan started contributing to ZJIT, he had never written Rust, never worked on a JIT compiler, and had no prior experience with Ruby internals. AI helped him get oriented in the codebase fast enough that he could focus on understanding the concepts rather than fighting the syntax. He estimates that what used to take weeks now takes half a day.
Invest 40 hours before you judge a project. This is a concrete heuristic worth bookmarking. Stan argues it takes roughly 40 hours of contribution before you can meaningfully understand a project’s conventions, culture, and potential and before the experience is worth listing on a résumé.
Ask questions in public. GitHub Issues over email, always. Your question is probably someone else’s question, and a maintainer’s public answer scales in a way a private reply never does.
Write and speak not just code. This is perhaps the most underrated point in the whole post. Trust in open source communities is built through visibility. Blog posts, conference talks, and even thoughtful issue comments all compound over time. Stan spoke at RubyKaigi for the first time in 2017, and credits that visibility with opening doors that pull requests alone never would have.
The Honest Part
Stan doesn’t sugarcoat the investment required. At his busiest, he was putting 500–1,000 personal hours per year into open source. Even today, it’s 200–500 hours annually.
His take is refreshingly direct: for most people, grinding LeetCode for 100–200 hours will get you a comparable job offer faster. Open source as a career path makes sense if you genuinely enjoy the work and want your code evaluated on its own terms not under interview pressure, but after careful thought.
It worked for him. He hasn’t sat through a traditional technical interview since his first internship.
Why It’s Worth Reading
The Ruby community is global, distributed, and largely non-native English-speaking Stan’s story reflects that reality more honestly than most career advice you’ll find. His path went from a startup in Taiwan → remote work for a UK company → Shopify, facilitated not by credentials, but by relationships built at RubyKaigi and Euruko.
If you’re an intermediate or advanced Ruby developer thinking about contributing more seriously to the ecosystem or wondering whether it can actually lead somewhere this is the piece to read.
👉 Building a Career with Open Source: From User to Maintainer Stan Lo
Also available in Japanese, translated by @hachi8833 at TechRacho.
Linking Ruby knowledge from the most remote places in the world. 