Power in numbers, and Pat Allan

Welcome to week two of our 2026 sponsorship drive!

Progress from week one

We’ve had a great response since we kicked things off last week: we’ve had ten new individuals join as sponsors! If everyone sticks around for a year (we’ll make it worthwhile, I promise!), that will amount to a full $2,400 towards our goal.

Thank you to our new supporters for proving there’s power in numbers!

We’d love to see more individuals get behind us, and if we can find 2-3 new businesses to join as supporters, we’ll get very close to being able to offer a first-time honorarium to our active maintainers. Learn more here.

Q&A with Pat

As a little treat this year, we’re bringing you Q&As from leading Hanakai users. First up we have Pat Allan! Pat is a friend, a leading voice in the Australian Ruby community, and an inspiring speaker.

Who are you, and what are you building?

Hullo, I’m Pat - a web developer based in Narrm/Melbourne, and I’ve been working with Ruby for over two decades. I have a few different hats to wear - but from a Hanakai perspective, I maintain and evolve the website for Readings, a Melbourne bookshop (and institution). Their website has been using various parts of the Hanakai toolset since mid-2022 (and in development for a good while before then!).

What made you reach for Hanakai, and what does your stack look like today?

The project was one I inherited from Tim and Icelab at the start of 2020, and involved some concepts that later evolved to be Hanami. Thankfully it was close enough that I’ve been able to largely migrate it to Hanami/Hanakai proper, and so I get to enjoy all the lovely things that the latest Hanakai versions provide. We’re using multiple slices - some of which we host as their own focused applications alongside the ‘full’ site - alongside PostgreSQL, Redis, and Elasticsearch. There’s a lot of data flowing in and out - upwards of two million product updates per day.

In my own side projects, I’m also reaching for Hanakai more and more. Sometimes that’s for the clear separation between state and behaviour, sometimes that’s for the elegance of multiple slices in a single codebase, and sometimes it’s for the care for humans that underpins the ethos of Hanakai and the team around it.

What’s a moment building with Hanakai that made you think, “yes, this is why”?

In some ways it’s actually the reverse - it’s when I step back to Rails for other work where I miss Hanakai. One moment lately was when writing unit tests alongside ActiveRecord models, and feeling frustrated by the deep (almost infinite) interface that those models can have, due to the combination of data and interactions kept all together. Hanami’s separation of repositories and data objects can lead to much cleaner - and more easily tested - code. In code like in life, healthy relationships should have respectful boundaries, and the Hanakai approach encourages that respect far better than Rails.

What are you excited about for the future?

I look forward to seeing the Ruby community stretch beyond just the Rails monoculture, to a point where it’s not presumed that Ruby and Rails are one and the same. And following that, I look forward to more and more Rubyists feeling comfortable with reaching for Hanakai as an option when developing web applications with Ruby.

Thank you Pat for sharing with us today!

Thank you Brandon!

This week we’d also like to share our thanks to our returning silver sponsor, Brandon Weaver. You’ll all know Brandon as the mind behind the beloved lemurs, and author of some of the deepest Ruby writing around.

We’re also lucky to know Brandon as one of our earliest supporters, and another big factor in giving me the confidence to take the leap and commit a day every week to Hanakai maintenance. Brandon’s also been forthcoming with advice about the mechanics of sponsorships, which has been very helpful across our program’s short life so far.

“In Ruby diversity is our greatest strength, whether that be the people, the ideas, or the technologies we use. Ruby is not just one framework, nor is it just one person, it is a community of passionate people pushing the boundaries of what’s possible not just as individuals, but as a collective. I am happy to continue to fund efforts building upon that vision of the future.”

— Brandon Weaver

Thank you Brandon!

Let’s keep going!

So that’s week two in the bag. A hugely encouraging start to this whole thing. Thanks again to our new sponsors, and we’ll see you again next week. Same time, same place, a fun new Q&A, and hopefully some new sponsorships to share!

Please continue to share these posts around, we appreciate your help!