I particularly enjoyed this interview because he was very easygoing. We discussed the Rails 3 project and what he enjoys most about it. We also talked about old stuff, such as the story of when he visited Brazil in 2005—if you didn’t know that, check it out!

Besides that, we also talked a bit about “Rework” related subjects such as people management and entrepreneurship. And I couldn’t let go of the opportunity to mention Ricardo Semler to him, of course :-)

So, a nice conversation—of around 24 minutes—with David Hansson himself is a good way to wrap up my material on RailsConf 2010. It was an excellent event with excellent people, and I hope to be able to meet you all again next year!

Of the 6 winners, I was not able to talk with neither Xavier Noria, from Spain, nor Jose Valim, from Brazil. He was not attending the conference this year. But I still intend to record them, probably through video conference, and then add them to this gallery.

Aaron Patterson

Also known as @tenderlove, Aaron did change the parsers arena in the Ruby world with his contributions to open-source projects such as Psych, the new Ruby 1.9 YAML parser. Moreover, if you deal with XML nowadays, you’re probably using Nokogiri underneath. Before that, we only had REXML and Hpricot, but Nokogiri delivered on performance. Another project was Mechanize. Because of that, we now have great parsers for the main internet formats, especially if you consider that in Rails, the JSON parser is the YAML parser.

Gregory Brown

Also known as @seacreature and also known for Ruby Mendicant. I was used to using his Ruport project before, which leverages the ancient PDF Writer to generate PDF reports. But PDF Writer was abandoned. So Gregory decided to create a new foundation to deal with PDF, and from there, we got Prawn, a more modern and capable Ruby library. Besides that, he authored the “Ruby Best Practices” book, which I recommend to anyone interested in improving their skills with Ruby.

Nick Quaranto

Also known as @qrush, he is young and works for Thoughtbot, the company that brought many great open-source projects such as Paperclip or Shoulda. But Nick had a complaint: publishing gems through the good old RubyForge.net was a tedious process.

Github radically changed the working process with open source, but we still had to cope with the old way of publishing the gem packages. So Nick created Gemcutter.org, which evolved rapidly and ended up replacing Rubygems.org, becoming the de facto gem repository. So, GitHub + Gemcutter modernized our open-source process.

Wayne E. Seguin

This is easy: @wayneeseguin. Wayne became well known for his most recent project, the RVM. It is now possible to have many different versions and different Ruby implementations running in the same environment. We can have Ruby 1.8 and 1.9 and JRuby running along. Even better, we can configure each project with its own particular Ruby implementation. A simple “rvm ruby-1.9.2” command is enough to hot-swap environments. This changed how our projects were organized, making it an order of magnitude easier. Moreover, it made it easy to have multiple web apps that depend on different Ruby settings running side by side on the same web server. Literally worth the award.

I had some trouble in the way because my Flip Mino HD battery wasn’t able to hold. Even worst to find out that it takes many hours to fully recharge. When I was almost finished with Nick Quaranto, the Flip went down South. From then on, I used my iPhone camera.

One can’t help it, the Flip is excellent for short clips, or anything fast. But I recorded around 2 and a half hours of footage. If I could, in the future I’d like to have a real camera, with a more decent battery.

Por outro lado, nos dias do evento os palestrantes ficaram bem espalhados e não era muito simples encontrar quem você queria, mas no último dia a maioria estava por perto, o que tornou meu trabalho mais simples. Se a bateria tivesse colaborado acho que conseguiria mais 3 ou 4 entrevistas facilmente.

On the other hand, during the event it was not an easy task to locate a speaker, but in the last day most of them were around the Speaker Lounge, which made my job a bit easier. If the battery were able to hold up, I could have easily recored 3 or 4 interviews.

In this first batch we have Ben Scofield, James Golick, Carl Lerche, Ryan Bates, and Santiago Pastorino.

Ben Scofield

Ben was the Program Chair of the event, co-chairing with Chad Fowler. He was responsible for many aspects of the show, including on organizing the program schedule. They got more than 300 proposals. The challenge was to create a program that was broad enough to not alienate anyone. In general I think they succeeded. Of course, some of us are here for a long time and we wished to have more hard core stuff. Mayne in the future.

James Golick

One the most hyped subjects of the season is non-relational databases, or “NoSQL”. So I wanted opinions from people already using it in some scale. James Golick has been talking about this for a while, specially about Cassandra. The idea was not to discuss specifics on NoSQL, so in the interview I aimed for opinions, why use it, what to use, when to use them and stuff like that.

I know him since around 2008, when I started using his “Resource Controller” gem and even recorded a screencast about it. I asked him to talk a bit about that too.

Carl Lerche

He became more well known after he started working on the big refactor of Rails 3. Carl works with Yehuda at Engine Yard and he also contributed on Merb. More recently he also contributed to the Bundler project, the dependency resolution system coming up with Rails 3. In this interview he tells us more about this project and also talks about investment in open source and Ruby Summer of Code.

Santiago Pastorino

Santiago works for WyeWorks, a 4 people company in Uruguay that deliver projects for Silicon Valley companies. They are teaching us that it doesn’t matter if your country is very small, that your local market is limited, that there are near to none local rubyists around, it is still possible to do great deeds.

And Santiago decided to start working on the Rails project, in the most simple way imaginable at first: by trying to eliminate all the annoying warning messages. It sounds simple, but it is not. And bit by bit he began to learn more about the framework and how to contribute even more. Everybody should follow his foot steps.

I still didn’t finish compiling all the videos or even writing the main article of the event, but I was getting anxious to publish this video with Robert Martin, that I was able to record in Baltimore. It is a 16 min long conversation about languages, career, certifications and Agile.

On Thursday, 10th, last day of RailsConf, Robert Martin delivered the “Twenty-Five Zeros” opening keynote. You can watch it, in its entirety, below:

In summary, he explains that since it was invented, computer hardware evolved by at least 25 orders of magnitude, while programming languages probably didn’t evolve at the same rate. Probably even not at all.

“Ah, but today we have object orientation, we have closures, etc” As Bob Martin reminded us, we may have better and more convenient ways to organize code. But since Fortran, at its core, we still only do sequence, selection and iteration. Meaning, assignment, “if” conditions, “while” loops.

Besides, he also reminds us how languages always live in cycles: they are born, have a crescendo, begin to stagnate and eventually die or stop growing. That’s why it is important for programmers to understand that they need to learn new languages all the time. He is learning Clojure which he recommends and I also think it is a great suggestion.

In this interview we comment a little bit on this subject. But going deeper I was interested in hearing from him about the current state of growth of Agile methodologies, such as Scrum and the sudden interest in Certifications.

Many may know Robert Martin as the author of the Clean Code book and he reveals that he is working on another book called “Clean Coder” – I don’t know if he was kidding, but this is a good theme: a programmer can’t be just an excellent programmer and bad in communication. There are many other important skills that build a complete professional.

Finally, Bob is also known being one of the people that signed the Agile Manifesto and he tells us the story of how this came to be, how the meeting was organized, who participated and how they came up with the famous 4 values.

All in all, many insights coming from a professional that has been in the field for more than 4 decades and has certainly experienced much more than any one of us.