So we do this little thing every year, and we've been doing it for a little while, indulge me for a little bit while we do this. It's called Ruby Heroes, and the purpose of it is to recognize

some of the lesser known people or the people that have done such great, important work in the Ruby community that we feel like we need to do something a little special for them. We run this on a website called RubyHeroes.com every year, so at the beginning of the year, or sometimes a little late sadly, we tell people to go to that website, and we say, hey, so this year,

who has impacted your life as a Rubyist, as a Rails developer? Who has made it easier? Who has produced stuff that helped you do your work or has been extremely kind to you or has made the community as a whole better? So as I said, we started doing this in 2008, so it's been nine years now,

and we've had a lot of really great people over the years, people that are more well known, people that are less well known over the years. So you might recognize some familiar faces that have gone on to do great things. And this year, we've had 454 nominations

from the community at large. We've had 133 nominees from these nominations, so people that were thanked by other people, and we have a committee of 20 past heroes among the previous heroes that went through and basically tried to do a step

which removes this aspect of popularity contest, so it's not just about how cool and popular people are. We're trying to find people who are doing great work and that are not necessarily well known. And they've selected nine new heroes for this year. This is actually a record. We've had eight one year, but never that many. So we're gonna try to keep it fast.

But before we do that, I'd like to thank a few people who helped us put this together, because they're amazing. So first, there's Ruby Central, which you know, of course, but they've helped us a ton getting this event together and helping the people that we're gonna thank come here, which is sometimes very difficult, you'll see.

Also, there's Code School. Morgan and I work for Code School, and they allow us to take the time to prepare this to work on the app every year to organize this event and come to you to present it. And lastly, there's you. And I wanna kinda take a moment to talk about you guys.

The importance here is when someone does something nice, it's very important for you to remember to say something about it, to go talk to them, especially when you're in a group like this where you can actually go see them. I know sometimes it can be scary, but if you do it or if you do it through Ruby Heroes, these people feel bolstered sometimes when stuff gets hard,

so it helps them. All right, so let's get to it. So instructions really quick. I'm not sure everybody's here. We've tried really, really hard to bring everybody here, and if they're not, then we'll just, you know, give them a round of applause. Otherwise, they'll come up on stage and see Morgan over there, who's gonna help him out.

And then we'll all look at them for a little bit awkwardly as they stand there. Because that's easy. So not a lot of time, a lot of heroes. As I said, watch your feet. I mentioned that. There's stairs over there. That's not for you guys. You can watch your feet if you want, but that's more for the people like trying to fumble over here.

So I'm gonna give you a little quote that someone said specifically while the nominations were going on about each person so that you get a sense of their impact if you're not familiar with them. First up, because of her tireless efforts in making the open-source community a better place by creating the contributor covenants

and trying incredibly hard to get people, even in the most hostile environments, to adopt it. Please welcome Coraline Ada Enkick.

He's a long-time Ruby and Rails committer,

organizes RubyKaigi, one of the great international Ruby conferences in Tokyo, and he's the author of many widely used gems like Kaminari, ActiveDecorator, Traceroute, Database Rewinder, and more. Please welcome Akira Matsuda. Matsuda Akira.

In the last four years, they have raised almost half a million dollars

and recruited hundreds of coaches and mentors to get dozens of women into programming and contributing to open-source. We can attest that it changes people's lives. Please welcome on stage the Rails Girls Summer of Code team, Annika Lintner, Laura Gaetano, and Sara Reagan.

He has put many years and tremendous effort into continuously and incrementally improving the CRuby implementation. He wrote YARV, pushed for flow numbs, implemented partial generation garbage collection, which is a mouthful, and many, many other improvements. All of these things have been the primary drivers of increased performance

and better garbage collection in Ruby. His impact is large, but his presence is not, at least in much of the world outside Japan. Please welcome Koichi Sasada. Sasada Koichi.

His articles are always informative and enjoyable. Furthermore, they focus on big language issues, performance, memory, delicious food, and they mention problems and solutions. He represents what is good about the Ruby community.

Please welcome on stage Richard Schneeman, or Schneeman.

He likes to sit on the other side. With Ruby Tapas, he continues his long tradition of leveling up Ruby developers everywhere. In his appearance on the Ruby Rogues podcast, he always asks interesting questions and provides tidbits of wisdom on Ruby and the state of our community. With books like Confident Ruby and Exceptional Ruby,

he has given guidance to many new Ruby developers on writing clean and readable Ruby code. He has inspired me, not me, but the person who said that, to not only be a better Ruby developer, but also a better software developer overall. That's why he's my Ruby hero. Please welcome Avdi Grimm. And finally, he has been leading the JRuby project

for most of its existence, which has been responsible for many enterprises actually using Ruby. He's constantly working on making JRuby better and faster and regularly going to conferences all over the world showing you how you can use Ruby and still have high performance. Please welcome Charles Nutter.

So now that they are all awkwardly looking at you and just waiting impatiently to get off on stage, can you please give them a really, really big round of applause, please?

Thank you all very much. That's it for us. And remember, this is important. Keep being nice to the people who make your life a little better every day. Thank you very much.