2. Ruby, Regexes and Risk: Aaron Patterson Explains Why Hiring Open Source Developers Will Make Your Company Stronger

In this episode Aaron Patterson joins our own developer advocate Jonan Scheffler to discuss his experiences as an open source developer within GitHub, and explains how he manages to balance his work as a member of the Ruby and Rails core teams with his other responsibilities.

Aaron is the only member of both the Ruby and Rails core teams, and he's been working with Rails since 2005 when his friends attended the No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS) Pacific Northwest Software Symposium and heard Dave Thomas speak.(1)

In discussing his path to becoming a Ruby developer, Aaron walks through his time working with Perl and Java, covering language regular expression engines (PCRE, Oniguruma, POSIX), the joy he felt in finding Ruby, and how falling in love with Ruby eventually forced him to become a C programmer.

Later in the episode Aaron offers some advice to aspiring open source developers and discusses the future of Ruby, along with some features he would like to see around deep freezing data structures(2) and concurrency/parallelism(3).

If you’d like to learn more about Ruby development and how you can contribute, please visit https://bugs.ruby-lang.org.

Links from this episode

1. Dave Thomas "Ruby on Rails" talk abstract from NFJS PNW Software Symposium
2. Vaidehi Joshi explains frozen hashes in Ruby
3. Rob Pike explains concurrency and parallelism at Waza 2012:

Episode source