We are stoked to share that the Rails Core team has announced Marco Roth as the 2025 Rails Luminary.

The Rails Luminary Awards exist to celebrate those in the community who have significantly advanced Rails for the benefit of all, through contributions, gems, ideas, or knowledge-sharing, and Marco ticked all of those boxes this year.

From Rails Core member Xavier Noria:

Marco has been a prolific Open Source author for many years, and is now doing outstanding work on Herb, ReActionView, and his vision for improving the tooling and user experience around the Rails view layer. He travels the world sharing his work and knowledge at conferences and, if you have met him, you know he is as highly skilled as he is humble and kind. Marco embodies everything this award represents: technical excellence, generous collaboration, and a genuine commitment to making Rails better for everyone. We couldn’t be more proud to present him with the Rails Luminary award.

If you haven’t followed Marco’s work, you can catch up by checking out his talks about Herb and ReActionView at three events this year: RubyKaigi, RailsConf, and Rails World.

Through these projects - plus being a genuinely positive, kind guy - Marco has helped inspire the community, and we can’t think of a better person to receive the Rails Luminary award this year.

As part of being a Rails Luminary, Marco received an award and will receive a $1,000 prize.

Thank you to all who nominated community members this year, and congratulations Marco. Thanks for all your work.

A few quotes from the nominations:

Marco Roth deserves recognition because he’s genuinely made Rails more fun and easier to work with. Thanks to things like Herb, building interactive UI in Rails suddenly feels lightweight and natural, and his work on Turbo Morphing solved a bunch of real-world frustrations people hit when using Hotwire every day. What I appreciate most is that Marco doesn’t just release code — he explains things, shares ideas, helps others, and pushes the ecosystem forward in a friendly, down-to-earth way. A lot of us build better Rails apps today because of the tools and patterns he’s brought to the community.

Marco’s been doing incredible work for Rails with Herb and ReactionView. Views have been a fairly unchanged thing in Rails for years and his work is improving ERB and views enormously. Herb has already found a ton of impossible to spot issues with my views. His Rails World talk got so many people excited and he really deserves credit for all his work on this, Stimulus, Turbo, etc.

Marco has been a huge Open Source ruby contributor, gathered the community together through the ruby events website, and tackled very hard and a bit neglected tooling problems for the front end.

Big shout out to Alessandro Rodi, Josua Schmid, and Yessin Ben Brahim from Renuo, who helped us organize a lastminute Railshöck meetup in Zurich and invited Marco so that we could surprise him with the award in person. Here’s a video of how it went!