Interviews

Just a month ago, David Heinemeier Hansson welcomed Rails' newest core team member, Santiago Pastorino. Strikingly, Santiago only started to contribute code to Rails earlier in the year and it's not every day that DHH is trumpeting someone else's productivity, so I had to catch up with him and learn his story.

IronRuby is an open source Ruby implementation being developed at Microsoft with the .NET CLR in mind. It's reasonably mature and as well being a regular implementation, it provides the ability to use Ruby directly within the Web browser through Microsoft's Silverlight Flash-esque framework. Windows seems to get a bad rap in the Ruby community so we thought we'd turn the spotlight on some of the cool things IronRuby's doing nowadays.

Ruby's creator and benevolent dictator Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto has done a video interview for InfoQ at the QCon enterprise software development conference. You can watch the video on InfoQ's page (or, if you're a member of InfoQ, download an MP3).

Blogo is a Mac / OS X blogging client developed by Brainjuice - the business name of Benjamin Jackson and Ivan Neto, Rio based Ruby developers and Web designers - and born out of their frustration with existing commercial blog editors.

Back in March, Ruby developer Gregory Brown raised the idea of receiving donations so he could work on open source Ruby projects full-time. It went well, and out of this project came Prawn, a pure Ruby PDF generation library. Not one to rest on his laurels, Gregory's now working on a book for O'Reilly called Ruby Best Practices, billed as "for programmers who want to use Ruby the way Rubyists do." The book will cover how to design "beautiful" APIs and DSLs, along with lots of other general topics that will make your code more expressive and make you a better Ruby developer into the bargain.

Rubyology is a Ruby-based podcast chaired by Chris Matthieu. Its focus is on interviewing interesting Ruby (and Rails) developers - finding out about their projects, what makes them tick, and extracting their insights into the Ruby and Rails worlds.

We first covered Mack in April, when I billed it as a "fast, best of the rest, Web app framework." Mack, a Ruby-based Web application framework, developed by a team led by Mark Bates, has continued to grow over the past several months and today announced a significant release, Mack 0.7.0.

There have been a bunch of interview related links coming in over the past week, so it makes sense to put them all together to give you a nice pre-Christmas injection of interesting interviews to read. Enjoy!

Interview with Evan Phoenix about Rubinius