I feel like the quality of ruby libraries has drastically improved over the last 10 years (article was written in 2012). Lots of older libraries, Open source devs would just develop their own DSLs that solve their problem. With the advent of rails, and rubocop, and well known conventions, good modern libraries have bubbled to the top to solve specific problems and the use of those libraries now are the "convention" for solving that set of problems.