The Ruby Hero Awards. Thank you guys for coming. We've got some great people to give some recognition to. This is kind of a quote that I feel kind of embodies the spirit of the Ruby Hero Awards.

This quote, in case you're wondering, is by the creepy photo of Abraham Lincoln. So actually I traveled back in time to get you an amazing high resolution photo of Abraham Lincoln. This is actually the eighth year that we did these, that we're doing these Ruby Hero Awards. We've done them since 2008. In case you're wondering who won them last year, here's the people that we gave away these awards to last year.

Some of them you probably know. Some of them are here. In 2013 we had eight heroes. Something like this. And then, well, we had a bunch before that.

And what's really interesting about some of these people is you probably recognize some of them, but at the time when they got their award they weren't nearly as well known as they are now. They were working hard for the betterment of the community. Right. A lot of these people work on projects that you might not even realize that you use.

You've got Ruby down here and you have all these stacks of pieces of open source that you use and your software sits up at the top. So a lot of them have contributed to all these little invisible pieces. But why do we do the Ruby Hero Awards? Well, a while back I first started the Rails Envy podcast which turned into the Ruby 5 podcast.

Just out of curiosity, who here has listened to the Ruby 5 podcast? Oh, you guys are awesome. Thank you. Thank you for listening. So the Ruby 5 podcast, we cover the latest news in the Ruby community twice a week. There's also a mailing list if you don't like listening. But in doing these podcasting, after you do it for a while,

you start to realize there's some of these same people that pop up week after week that are doing open source, that are doing blog posts, that are continuously helping people without any urge to get any recognition from it. And so in doing that, we realized, what if we could find some way to give these people some recognition?

And we realized, well, hey, maybe we should create some awards to give some of these people that continuously work hard for the betterment of all of us. So RubyHeroAwards.com, a couple of months ago, we put it up there for nominations, as we do every year. We got 397 nominations this year, pretty good.

And you can't just nominate somebody, you actually have to type something out as to why they deserve it. So what we do is we take those nominations and we bring them to the 44 past heroes because we don't want it to be a popularity contest and we say, here, heroes, here are the people that people got nominated, and here are some of the reasons,

and why don't you guys nominate who you think? And so we kind of do that, they nominate who they think is at the top, who deserves recognition, and that's how we come up with six new Ruby heroes. So we have them, five should be here today amongst us. Very exciting. So with, uh, I'm gonna hand it over to Olivier to, uh, to present the rest.

I'm literally handing it over. Um, so I know that a lot of people look at code metrics and contribution metrics and this is actually the six heroes. And one thing we want you to realize is that it's not all about code.

Uh, you don't have to contribute code to be a useful, amazing member of this community. So remember that, it's not just about that. We, we'd like to take a second to, to thank Ruby Central and all the really wonderful people that make it, uh, to organize this conference and allow us to do this. Um, and also to everyone who took the time to vote and say nice things about people

who help them and make software that they use. Uh, and a little quick note, like we actually do this at Code School, uh, we put it together, we actually spend the time to put this website and actually make these beautiful little trophies over there and something else that you might hear about later. Um, and this is the kind of stuff that we do on our end to help new people join the community. Um, and

actually we have a little thing, if you ever want to contribute to Rails, it might be nice to understand the canonical Rails app. So one thing that you guys did was actually go talk to. Yeah, if you don't know, if you haven't heard of the series that we put together

recently, we basically, me and Carlos Sosa sat down, tried to reproduce some features from Basecamp, took about six minutes, whiteboarded it out, coded up some features, then we actually flew to Chicago and we sat down with David Heimer Hansen and sat down with him and he looked at our code and sort of did some pair programming with him. No pressure, he just wrote

Rails, right? And so he commented on, uh, on how we worked on it and this episode, Basecamp Surge is free, so you're welcome to sort of check it out and hopefully learn something about, uh, sort of David's philosophy when it comes to coding in Rails. You can see Carlos longingly looking at DHH. Please code for me. Um, so one

important thing that we want to make sure that everyone understands about this before we start is that the best way to keep this community strong is through positive reinforcement. So, you don't, first of all, if you find someone that is a past hero or someone that actually made software to make your life easier, I know it can be stressful to actually go to people and say, hi, I like your software, do you have

stickers? Uh, but it's very important to go to these people, give them a hug if they're cool with it, um, or simply say thank you for doing this. It actually changed my

life. I got a job, I used your software, it was very important for my company, things like that. Uh, so remember to do that and take the time to do it today, please. So, without further ado, we're gonna start, first of all, little directions for the heroes. Um, you're, when we say your name, uh, you're gonna wiggle a little bit and then you're

gonna come over here to my lovely assistant. Uh, he is going to hand you a lovely little award and then you're gonna stick around because we wanna take a beautiful photo of you. There's, uh, we have a sniper photographer right there ready for, for cool photos that you could probably use for better GitHub profile pictures because seriously, pixelated pictures of programmers, no. Um, so, we're gonna begin with the first hero

and I'm gonna just give you a few hints, uh, about this person and this might give it away right away right there. So this is a graph of all time commits to Ruby MRI. There's this big line up there that goes up and up and up and up and up and you see like the very

beginning, there's 1998 and then this thing, this monster takes over slowly. Uh, and you can actually see the number of commits. There's 10,946 commits and Matt's is 3,758 which is crazy. Um, here's another view on that. You can see like since 2009-ish

basically, this person has been contributing like a, it looks like a sine wave. That's how crazy this contribution graph is. It's just like it keeps increasing. I don't know, he's gaining power somehow. Uh, and the way he contributes to this community is through

patches, patches, and patches. Uh, here are a few things that people had to say about this person. Uh, without him it doesn't matter what feature exists or how fast Ruby becomes because no one can use a language without, with bugs. If he was a fish, then

patches would be water because he lives on them. That is my favorite quote of any hero. Uh, he's a TIDOS contributor. He's, it's unbelievable how fast he fixes but I feel like anybody who knows this person realizes that he must have some superhuman powers forged

into a volcano or something. Um, and he is known as the MRI patch monster. So, this hero is Nobuyoshi Nakada. So, sadly, I, I talked to Nobu and I was like, could you

please come? And he was like, but I have children I have to take care of. So he uh, we'll try to have someone accept. I think Koichi was, if, is Koichi in the audience

anywhere? Could you, do you mind coming in and picking it up for him and then we'll make you feel awkward for a little bit? Cause you're all so amazing. But you know, just over there. Yeah, give it up for Koichi. That's, that's an epic entrance.

Generational entrance, I don't know. Thank you, you, one person. So, let's move onto hero number two so I don't just drone on forever. Uh, hero number two, uh, has cont-contributed in a very short amount of time. Her contributions have been plentiful and

her actually explorations of active record which is this, this scary thing actually for me and for a lot of people because you don't really understand what the underlying things in active records do and what is the tricky parts of active rec- what are the tricky

parts? Um, and this is a few of the things that people had to say about her. She has been relentlessly tackling some of the least exciting bugs and optimizations in Rails this year. She's deprecated things, she's removed code, refactored confusing or brittle code. We need more people like her. She's mentoring students to start cont-

contribute to OSS, specifically to Rails. We need more people like her to keep our community growing. And this hero is, mm, Eileen Uchitel. Did I get your name right? Alright,

moving onto hero number three. There's only six, so you're fine. So, this person co-founded Railsbridge, co-founded Bridge Foundry to help people, uh, women in overly, uh,

men-focused communities to actually welcome more diverse groups of people and not just only women. Um, and she's actually recently expanded that to not just this community, the Rails community, the Ruby community, but other communities because anybody can benefit from that. Um, more recently she's joined Ruby Central as a director and she actually has

contributed to making this thing that you're sitting in happen. And that is a lot of work. Um, and she also worked really hard, which I think is really important to me because I wouldn't be here if it weren't for people like her to help people who have never

contributed or never tried to make a conference proposal actually get in so that we get new blood, not just in the community and op- and soft- software, but in talks and experiences and things like that. So she can actually help you if you haven't ever proposed any- anything to a conference talk. This is a few of the things that people

had to say about her. She's one of the few female role models we have in the community. She strives to teach and share at every opportunity. She's written some of the best essays on diversity, Ruby databases that I've read in the last few years. She's a Rubyist and she's a hero. She contributes to the open source and Ruby communities in a

way- in ways that a glance at a GitHub profile fails to communicate. And this hero is Sarah May. Hero number 4. There are things that people don't like to work on

updating documentation is one of the things that people don't like to work on. But there's someone that took up that job and started something called the Ruby documentation

project along with many documentation tasks because if you know the usual thing that happens with Ruby is that people go see the source because maybe the documentation's not very useful. Well this person actually took that on like some of the other heroes here tonight- today. This morning. Um and uh here are some of the things that people had to

say about him. He's made 500 commits to Rails over the past 2 years making him the number 5 contributor to over that period. He does extensive documentation work and brings in and facilitates new contributors to the Ruby ecosystem. And this person is Zachary

Scott. Going on to hero number 5. So I don't know if any of you have used this thing

called sequel. It's pretty amazing and it's been going on for years and has been maintained by pretty much mostly one person. Um it's extremely well maintained. So much so that I think about 20 people mentioned that there are never open issues on this damn

project. Which is crazy. And you can see again like just the same as Nobu the the regularity it's not crazy but it's like the regularity over over since 2008 on this project has been incredible. Uh he has also created the Rhoda routing tree web framework which if you haven't had your mind blown yet you should watch the lightning talk videos

from yesterday because he introduced it in the most amazing lightning talk I've seen this year. And here's here are some of the things that people had to say about this hero. He's not only the creator and maintainer of several brilliant libraries, foremost among them the peerless sequel. He offers the most incredibly patient and helpful support as

any viewing of sequel talk will illustrate. The sequel library is a massive body of intellectual work mostly contributed by one person just look at the size scope breath breath of his work it's astounding. And this hero is Jeremy Evans. Last hero. I don't

know if you've heard about this thing called mini profiler. Uh we use it at code school. A lot of people use it. It's actually very very useful to detect bottlenecks and problems with performance in your application on the production side or the development side. Um so this hero has also worked on a very difficult task which is demystifying the

Ruby garbage collector and in a series of blog posts just making people aware of the quirks and when it was ready for production and new versions of Ruby how to speed up rails 4.2 um how to debug memory leaks which I don't know how to do very well and I

need a lot of help. And more recently he's created a project called Ruby bench which is useful for benchmarking Ruby applications and see how their performance evolves over time. He's also worked on a tiny project called discourse that no one has probably heard of. And here are some of the things that people had to say about him. His work

on Ruby and rails performance since he started working on discourse had been a breath of fresh air in the Ruby community. Everyone wants faster programs but few do anything about it. He's championed and written speeds and benchmarking utilities for years. He contributes a lot to the Ruby and rails community in terms of performance and

benchmarking. Rails 4.2 would have serious issues without him. This hero is Sam Safran. So here's a quick recap. We're gonna line them up. So let's get you guys

come up to the front of the stage and let's do one more round of applause for this year's Ruby Hero Awards. Follow you two. It's not over yet. Wait a minute. There's something that

I find important to mention. Uh we're not just singling out people to reward them so that they would do tedious things. These are things that everybody can do. Everybody can do right now. All it takes is showing up. All it takes is helping, lending a hand, talking to someone. And so just to make sure that you remember that, we decided to

do something a little special this time. I believe sincerely that all the people who showed up at this conference and all the Ruby conference anywhere are all Ruby Heroes because they participate in making this community stronger and nicer and more

diverse. And I'm not kidding when I'm saying that you are seriously a Ruby Hero today because if you take a little bit of time after the panel, walk out that way but not now cause it won't be ready now. You'll all be getting this lovely thing. A very important

thing about this thing. If you take it, you have to live up to it. So I expect you next

year on this stage. I'm not kidding. You can do it. All it takes is just talking to those people, thanking them, learning how they did it, listening to them, finding issues, fixing them and helping everybody along at the same time. Thank you very much.