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.
Enjoy them all. This is for all of my friends in Japan! Thanks again for the hospitality.