Famous Ruby Personalities: Who do you recommend?

Ruby is designed to make programmers happy

Do we really care? Goggle for Famous Ruby Personalities and you will be surprised to find no relevant information on this. Let us try and addresses this issue and salute the Famous Ruby Personalities that have helped Ruby developers and enthusiasts have fun, joy and be happy while programming!

Rock Stars

Yukihiro Matsumoto or “Matz,” as he is known online, obviously is the first choice for giving us this wonderful Ruby programming language. Amongst the many things Matz is involved in, Eihiro Saishu and Matz are actively promoting “The Ruby Association Certified Ruby Programmer examinations.” The future for Ruby certainly looks interesting, and potentially very dramatic.

Dave Thomas author of the Programming Ruby book commonly known as “The Pickaxe” because of the pickaxe on the cover. The book has helped Ruby to spread outside Japan.

David Heinemeier Hansson¹ the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wiki. Ruby on Rails is attributed to the rise in the popularity of the Ruby programming language, all over the world.

Bruce Tate² has an amazing track record when it comes to identifying successful technologies. In his book Beyond Java, Bruce looked at languages and technologies that may challenge Java’s dominance in some development niches. He is instrumental in the growing list of Java developers adopting Ruby.

why the lucky stiff (often known simply as why or _why) is the persona of a prolific writer, cartoonist, musician, artist, and computer programmer notable for his work with the Ruby programming language. His best known work is Why’s (poignant) Guide to Ruby, which “teaches Ruby with stories.” His other contributions are: Try Ruby an online interactive learning tool that provides a browser-based Ruby shell and an instructor that guides beginners through their first steps in Ruby. Hackety Hack, a Ruby- and Mozilla- based environment used to teach programming to children. Shoes³ a UI toolkit “for Making Web-like Desktop Apps.”

The Rising Stars

Ruby continues to grow in popularity, thanks to the contributions of these rising stars (amongst many and in no particular order) -

Charles Nutter⁴ is a strong advocate of JRuby, a Java implementation of the Ruby interpreter, being developed by the JRuby team. Hopefully, JRuby will bridge the gap between the Ruby and Java communities.

Chad Fowler⁵ has been a software developer and manager for some of the world’s largest corporations. Until recently, Chad lived and worked in India, setting up and leading an offshore software development center. He is also co-founder of Ruby Central, Inc., a non-profit corporation responsible for the annual International Ruby and Rails Conferences, a leading contributor in the Ruby community and a contributor and editor for numerous books. Chad’s most recent book is Rails Recipes, published by the Pragmatic Programmers.

James Edward Gray II⁶ started the Ruby Quiz and ran it for the first three years. He wrote documentation for some standard libraries including ERb and PStore and created some open source libraries including FasterCSV and HighLine. He has also written a couple of Pragmatic Programmer books with lots of Ruby in them. He speaks at some Ruby conferences, and now helps maintain a few of Ruby’s standard libraries.

Peter Cooper is an England-based developer and serial entrepreneur with diverse interests across the worlds of technology and open source. He’s the editor of Ruby Inside, the most popular Ruby news blog, as well as the author of the popular book Beginning Ruby.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz⁷ has been using Ruby for 5 years or so and Rails since it’s first public release in 2004. He is the founder of EngineYard.com, a fully managed Ruby application hosting service. He has a number of open source projects such as BackgrounDrb, ez-where, Rubinius and Merb. He is also the author of the Rails Deployment book for the Pragmatic Programmers.

Ryan Bates has been involved in web development since 1998. In 2005 he started working professionally with Ruby on Rails and is now best known for his work on Railscasts, the free Ruby on Rails screencast series.

Ryan Davis known as “zenspider”, is the author of a number of valuable Ruby open-source tools, including RubyInline and ZenTest. He is working on Rubinius for Engine Yard.

David Black is the author of two books - “Ruby for Rails” and “Rails Routing“. His new book The Well-Grounded Rubyist will be released soon. David has his own consultancy, Ruby Power and Light, LLC and is also one of the founding directors of Ruby Central, Inc., the parent organization of the annual International Ruby Conference (”RubyConf”) and the International Rails Conference and RailsConf Europe.

Yehuda Katz has been working with Ruby and Rails since before Rails 1.0, and got involved in Merb early on. He is a member of the jQuery Core Team, and a core contributor to DataMapper. He contributes to many open source projects, like Rubinius and Johnson, and works on some he created himself, like Thor. Yehuda is co-author of jQuery in Action, a contributor to Ruby in Practice, and is currently working on Merb in Action, set to be the first Merb book on the market. He is currently employed by Engine Yard, where he works on internal development projects, and of course, Merb.

Who do you recommend? I need YOUR help. Which Ruby Rising Stars would your recommend and why? Post your recommendations as comments to this blog post.

Update:

• This blog post is also being discussed on dzone
• I am updating this post based on reader feedback