[Journey to Japan #3] Exclusive Video Interviews

Posted on November 28, 2011

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my Ruby Kaigi 2011 trip. Since then I’ve been really busy and I left out lots of great material shamelessly accumulating dust in my hard drive, but no more. Today I was finally able to edit some of that and upload the interviews I have recorded with some of the most well known Japanese Ruby contributors. Wonderful people that I was lucky to meet and that were very friendly to me and eager to tell their stories.

These are the first versions of the edited videos, I still didn’t have time to add English subtitles, but I wanted to upload them as soon as possible so the Japanese community could check them out first. I will try to add the subtitles in the following days (help would be appreciated). The Matz interview in particular has the worst audio as we were in the middle of an after-party in a small bar with very bad acoustics, so I apologize for its quality, I hope you can get most out of it.

Alencar Koga helped me out a lot during the interviews. Coincidentally he is a Brazilian just like me, but he’s been living in Japan for a long time and was able to build a great career, being now the CTO of MTI Japan, one of the largest mobile app developers in the country. Akira Matsuda also helped me a lot, and he is also a very well known Rubyist in Japan. Both were edited out of the videos to make them shorter to watch. I appreciate their help a lot as they will be very useful when I do the English subtitles.

The first three videos were recorded at the after-party in the first day of Ruby Kaigi. I have to admit that I was not in my best shape after having a few drinks and after a full day of event :-) By the way, the second and third video interviews were introduced by me in Brazilian Portuguese instead of English, so forgive me for my confusion. All of them have myself making questions in English and the guests replying back in Japanese. Only the Matz interview is all in English.

Shintaro Kakutani-san was the first one I’ve interviewed, being one of the main organizers of the event and a long time Ruby evangelist in Japan. He is a very active community leader, helping maintain the Japanese Ruby ecosystem.

The second one was Gotou Yuzou-san, he is one of the oldest Ruby Core Committers being the author of both Webrick and OpenSSL. He wrote a few books about Ruby in Japan and he works for the Tokyo branch of Nacl, the company from Matsue that has been contributing to Ruby since the beginning, hiring Matz as a fellow researcher.

The third one was recorded when the party was over. I was able to reach the couple Yasuko and Koichiro Ohba. Yasuko-san is well known being the president of the consulting company EveryLeaf. She employs several Ruby developers and does Ruby related projects and now mobile development as well. She is an example of entrepreneurship in the community. Koichiro-san works for a Heroku-like company in Japan, managing Cloud based infrastructure using JRuby technology. He contributes and evangelizes JRuby, specially in terms of documentation, localization (internationalization, etc).

On the second day of the event I was able to catch up with Nobuyoshi Nakada-san. He is “the” oldest Ruby Core Contributor, and he probably touched every single part of Ruby. He is also known as “the patch monster” as he seems to be a coding machine, being more active through out the last 15 years than Matz himself. He deserved to be the first one Matz chose to follow him at SalesForce.com.

Finally, at the Heroku Drink up in the last day of the event, I was finally able to grab Matz himself for an interview. Having been continuously and consistently on this road for that last few years, you can imagine how thrilled I was for having being able to interview Matz himself in person, at my home land in Japan. But as I’ve warned before, the audio is not good because of all the noise. At least Matz can speak English so everybody will be able to get most of this one.