Who is José Valim?

@josevalim An open source developer, a speaker, a musician and an entrepreneur. I’m co-founder and lead developer at Plataforma Tecnologia – a development and consultancy company focused on Ruby and Rails, based in Brazil – and a Rails Core Team member. I am happily living in Kraków with my wife!

Where and when did you start programming?

I was 12 years old when I had my first contact with programming. At that time my parents bought a computer, which came with a BASIC book. This experience lasted no more than 2 hours as I failed to do the calculator example from the first chapter. :)

However, when I was 17 years old at university, I found that my failed experience five years before was called “programming”. I took C classes there and I was known by professors for asking unusual questions as: “what happens if I don’t include the library headers?” or “what if I pass an invalid argument here?”. A few professors quickly understood that I wanted more than introductory material in the courses and a few eventually explained to me how C compilers worked behind the scenes. It was a fun experience!

A few months later, my dark ages started. :)

First, I decided to use Flash and learn ActionScript by myself in order to create my band’s website. Next, I did PHP development with MySQL and PostgreSQL as freelancer. That was pretty much the deal until my fourth year in university when Hugo Baraúna, who played guitar with me in the band, invited me to be part of a web startup.

In the startup, they were using a new framework for web development called (surprise, surprise) Ruby on Rails.

Why Ruby/Rails?

Since my experience before using Ruby on Rails was limited to PHP, Active Record really amazed me in the beginning. However, today I clearly see that my true love is really Ruby! Ruby gives me the freedom, fun and motivation to work and contribute to open source as I do today!

What does your typical day look like?

Hrm, it is actually hard for me to describe a typical day. They vary a lot, but let’s try it!

Currently, I work from my home office in Poland and I always start my day reading my e-mails. After that it’s just a “controlled chaotic schedule”. Basically I work on Rails, other open source projects, Plataforma Tecnologia’s customers’ projects, preparing talks and presentations, writing blog posts or conferencing via Skype.

Finally, due to time zone difference between Brazil, sometimes I need to stay up late, while other times my wife makes me go to bed early!

What do you do in your free time?

Most of my free time today goes out to family time. Sometimes I do enjoy playing the guitar and I really hope to get an electric piano soon.

Current favorite apps?

Github, codebase, typewith.me, campfire and dropbox. Without them I couldn’t get my work done.

What OS do you prefer?

OS X, Snow Leopard. Although I wish I had less snow around here.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Ok, this is the current picture of my table, no cheating, no changes:

Favorite: Color, Font, Language, JS Framework?

Blue, Monaco, Ruby, jQuery.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I definitely love how Plataforma Tecnologia is shaping up and every single day I get inspired by someone in our team doing something different or creative. Although most of it is internal to the company, part goes out as open source contributions helping a lot of people out there.

The Rails Core Team also inspires me. It is a big team (today we are 9), working on a big project with big challenges but we are still able to meet every single of these challenges with simple and useful solutions.

Finally, I am frequently surprised and inspired by the different music that I hear around Europe. Mentions go to Phoenix (French band), Sigur Rós (Icelandic band) and The Swell Season (Irish and Czech duo).

What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?

I like a mix of both. As a co-founder of Plataforma Tecnologia, I face different challenges from different projects frequently, just like a freelancer would, and I also get the change to be constantly building something meaningful, in this case Plataforma Tecnologia itself. So I have the best of both worlds.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2010?

I am very thankful that this year was already full of achievements: Plataforma Tecnologia has doubled its size compared to one year ago, I was invited to be part of Rails Core, I had a successful talk at Euruko (biggest Ruby conference in Europe), I won a Ruby Hero award and we shipped Rails 3!

On the personal front, I want to get back at studying music and finally start to learn some Polish. But I believe the most exciting news is on the open source front. We have great plans for Rails 3.1 and we also want to get Devise 1.2, with OAuth 2 support, out.

Who is Ryan Bates?

I host and produce Railscasts, free Ruby on Rails screencasts which are released every Monday. Teaching is my passion, and I love doing it through screencasts.

Why Rails?

I got started with PHP but found I was quickly creating spaghetti code which had no structure. A large site became nearly unmaintainable so I looked for alternatives. Rails was a rising star at the time so I looked into it skeptically but was very impressed by the speed and ease in which I could create complex apps. I haven’t looked back since.

What does your typical day look like?

I work for my dad’s company, Artbeats, as the sole web developer. The rest of the time I usually spend working on Railscasts and open source projects.

What do you do in your free time?

I enjoy playing video games, bowling, tennis, movies, and spending time with my family.

Current favorite apps?

On the OS: TextMate, Terminal and Safari. I find it to be a fantastic
trinity for web development.

On the web: GitHub, Gmail and Twitter are what I find most useful.

What OS do you prefer?

Mac OS X.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Favorite: Language (PHP, Python …), JS Framework?

Ruby and jQuery.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2010?

I have something big in the works for Railscasts but I cannot speak of it yet. Shhh.

Who is Dr Nic Williams?

I tentatively started referring to myself as ‘Dr Nic’ in 2006 on forums and blog comments after I created my blog http://drnicwilliams.com I acquired that domain only because some clown had just taken http://nicwilliams.com Similarly, I wasn’t able to get nicwilliams@gmail.com when I created an account. My history online shows that ‘nicwilliams’ was my normal login name for sites I used pre-2006: rubyforge, skype, the old rails trac ticket system, etc. I was kind of committed to “Dr Nic” after I released a fun library “Dr Nic’s Magic Models” in 2006. Who puts their own name in a project title? I just felt the title “Magic Models” needed author attribution. Soon my other project’s were being called “Dr Nic’s XYZ” and at conferences no one knew who I was if I only introduced myself as “Nic Williams”.

It was a bit of fun when I was anonymous and it grew from there. Pretty lucky.

Why Ruby?

I’ve used languages that had metaprogramming facilities before, such as Python and Smalltalk, though Ruby was the first language and had the first community of users who valued and were motivated by “code aesthetics”. I like exploring “best looking API design” and “if I change this library, then my app code looks awesome” aspects of software design.

Ruby has also been a beacon to attract some great software developers who have created wonderful open source projects, such as rails, capistrano, cucumber, rspec, haml and more. So the ecosystem around Ruby makes the language itself more wonderful.

Git or SVN?

What a delightfully retro question. Perhaps the question could be “git vs hg vs darcs?” or similar. I use git, my toolset is built around git, including deployment to Heroku via git. I’m sure mercurial users have evolved to have a similar ecosystem. Our’s is very optimized around git. For example, I now maintain the ‘github’ command-line app, which let’s you search, clone and fork projects on Github. It is the ultimate tool for open source developers who use git and github.

What does your typical day look like?

The Mocra office opens at 7:30 and people wander home after 4:30. This gives us good overlap with clients in America and helps beat the morning traffic.

What do you do in your free time?

I’m married with two kids. I’ll ask my friends what “free time” means.

Current favorite apps?

I love apps that I can hack, configure, and rewire. TextMate’s “bundles” allow it to be customized to any new programming languages, frameworks or libraries that come along that it never knew existed. I’ve maintained or created a dozen of these, that’s how fun it is to customize your text editor.

The same thrill applies to FireFox and Chrome/Chromium and the ability to run extensions/greasemonkey scripts to modify other people’s sites.

What OS do you prefer?

I prefer OS X because it prefers me.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Favorite: Language (Ruby, Python ….), JS Framework?

I love Ruby. I know Ruby, I know it’s libraries, I know how to test it; so I get the benefit of experience now. But even when I knew very little I loved it. I’ve used Python, Smalltalk, Java, C, Objective-C, etc. Ruby and I think the same way.

For testing, I lean heavily on integration tests and less on unit testing. Currently we’re using cucumber with capybara (instead of webrat) as it seems to have nice JavaScript support for scenarios that need it.

For browser-side scripts with JavaScript, I prefer the jQuery library. I’ve only used PrototypeJS before it. I’ve written moderate JavaScript apps, blog badges and greasemonkey scripts, and I always like to start with jQuery.

For unit testing JavaScript, I still like Blue Ridge and did excitable talk on it in 2009 in London. I’m still looking though and hope the perfect, pre-packaged JavaScript testing environment for Rails apps and stand-alone JavaScript widgets comes along.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I recently drove 14 days, 3000+km across Nepal and India in a tiny auto-rickshaw, without my armada of laptop, internet and distractions. The inspiration came when I realized “I need to do this more often!” I love coding, but I need to create more time to explicitly not code.

What are your personal projects and goals for 2010?

I don’t commonly have “personnal project goals” – the worst place a bug or fun idea can be is on my TODO list. I’ll often never get it it.

With Rails 3 coming into public existence, and all the community of dependent open source projects being upgraded, it is now time to upgrade the Rails TextMate bundle again. I started with a twitter account (@railstmbundle) to summarize changes and my thoughts. Before I get too excited I need a wholesale solution to supporting Rails 2 and Rails 3. We’ve never attempted this before; well, Rails has never changed so radically before.

For Mocra, we have a number of goals for the year. We’ll announcement when we achieve them!


Who is Anil Wadghule?

Anil is 26 year old programmer, hacker. He loves writing programs. Specially likes writing useful plugins, libraries. Over the last few years, he has become programming language obsessive and likes to learn new programming languages. Academically he has done engineering in Computer Science. He works for a software company in Pune.

Why Ruby?

I got introduced to Ruby in 2006 when I found some great del.icio.us popular links of tutorials and blogs about Ruby. A guy named Premshree who works for Yahoo was using it. He had done some talks and had written some blog posts about it. I read his stuff in early days. I read why’s Poignant’s Guide to Ruby and his blog got to know about stylish Ruby people. Later I completed reading free online version of Programming Ruby. All these things started my journey into Ruby programming world.

I started loving this beautiful programming language so much. I got a job in a programming shop in Pune where Ruby was a primary programming language. During that period, I came to know about awesome guys like defunkt, _why, Chad Fowler & Peter Cooper. They were all doing great stuff that time. I was always fascinated about them. I started attending local Ruby meets where I met with guy named Pratik Naik (now in Rails core) who was also doing Ruby that time. It is all interesting world from that time and I am in love with Ruby since.

Ruby is a awesome programming language which helps to solve your problems in very a less time. I love it’s syntax, metaprogramming features, fully object orientedness. The framework like Rails makes full benefit of the language features and that’s why Rails so powerful.

Best Framework in your opinion?

I think Ruby on Rails is the best web framework available there. Specially Rails 3.0 version makes it more powerful. Rails 3 is written to be very modular way. It’s now easy to swap out pieces as you wanted. The other mini web framework like Sinatra is very cool. For developing small web apps, it’s perfect but for developing bigger projects you will eventually end up using Rails as it’s a perfectly suitable.

I have not played enough with Django. Rails is RESTful oriented and a True MVC that Django is missing. But still I would like to use Django for a project someday.

Git or SVN?

Obviously Git. I have used SVN extensively in earlier time. SVN is damn slow. It does not help you much other than committing the files and updating the files. Git is perfect. It is very fast. it is distributed. You have your own copy of repository. You can work on your project when net is down. Git’s branching is awesome. It’s so easy to branch and merge too. Git tools I love are git stash, git rebase -i and git add -p. I use git-svn for SVN repositories. You won’t miss git with git-svn. I am proud to be one of the early users of GitHub and it has really changed the way we develop.

What does your typical day look like?

I can tell about my ideal day. I wake up around 7:30am in the morning, have a cup of tea, read overnight’s Twitter updates on mobile, read newspaper. After I try to get some exercise for 5-10 minutes.

I get ready around 8:30am. I travel to work by bike ad reach there around 9:15am. First thing I do at work is to check work related emails and reply them. Then I read my personal emails and read online news, blog feeds and twitter feed links. I start my work around 10am. I try to have some discussions about work in 10-15 minutes of time and continue doing my work.

At 1pm, I go to lunch. After lunch I play some Wii Tennis or Table Tennis with colleagues. I get back to work around 2pm. My most productive time at work in between 2:30pm to 5:00pm. Then, I discus with my seniors about done and remaining work. Around 7pm, I leave office.

I have my dinner around 9pm, then around 10pm, I again sit with my laptop. I work on personal projects this time. I read some of articles found during morning this time. I get logged in to IRC and try to discuss on some topics with IRC friends. Many times, I chose reading tech books over being with laptop at night. I usually get to bed somewhere around 12:30am. But sometimes, I keep working on the things or reading stuff and get to bed around 2:30am.

Current favorite apps?

Tweetie, Things, Google Chrome, Dropbox, 1Password. I like both TextMate and Aquamacs.

For my mobile Nokia E71, I love using Gravity as Twitter client and love it. It’s recent geo tweet and Foursquare support is awesome.

On web my current favorite apps are Twitter, Github, Foursquare, Flickr.

What OS do you prefer?

I use Mac OSX as my OS, particularly love Snow Leopard. At work, I use Ubuntu. I prefer Unix OSs for servers.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Favorite: Language (Python, Ruby ..), JS Framework?

I love Ruby and Python. There are times I preferred Python to Ruby as Python has good set of libraries and those really help. I am a fan of JQuery and love it.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

Rack, a Ruby webserver interface have inspired me a lot in recent times. I love Rack’s concept. I played a lot with various Rack apps, middlewares, servers. I am also crazy about Design patterns. Object oriented concepts, TDD. I love NoSQL databases Redis and MongoDB. I love Node.js. I really liked Lifo’s Cramp with Websockets.

Apart from code, I like to drive my new car Hyundai i10.

I have to mention that I am huge fan of A. R. Rahman. His music inspires me a lot. 90% of my music is his. My joy knew no bounds when he got Oscars and Grammys. (BTW he got double Oscar and double Grammy .. so think how much excited I was)

What are your personnel projects and goals for 2010?

Become a better programmer. Work more on open source and side projects. Specially contribute to Rails. Travel to nice places as much as possible.

Who’s David Heinemeier Hansson?

I’m the creator of the web-framework Ruby on Rails and a partner at 37signals. I’m originally from Copenhagen, Denmark, but have lived in the US for the last four years.

Why Ruby?

Because it’s the most beautiful programming language I’ve ever seen. It makes me smile daily. It’s just a pragmatic mix of ingenuity and stuff that just works. It’s also malleable like nothing else. Your extensions to the language can blend in seamlessly with the core. I’m in love with Ruby.

Do you have a Brand?

If by brand you mean that many people in programming and startup circles know who I am and what I stand for, then yes. When you don’t have the marketing muscle or budget of the big guys, your best weapon is to have better ideas and to share them more easily and quickly. I try to do just that.

What does your typical day look like?

I usually get started around 7:30 and work from bed until 10 or so. Catching up on the world, chiming in on our company Campfire, and responding to an onslaught of emails. I do most of my real programming in the afternoon.

What are the tools you couldn’t live without?

TextMate, Campfire, Safari, Mac, iChat, Mail, Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise.

What do you do in your free time?

I love photography and I love racing cars.

Current favorite apps?

That would go to point #5.

What OS do you prefer?

OS X.

Small pic for your Workplace?

Favorite: Colors, Font, Languages, JS Framework?

All Hallow’s Eve color scheme in TextMate, Bitstream Vera 12, Ruby, Prototype.

The things or source that inspired you?

Things that annoy me. Nothing gets me more fired up to fix stuff than being personally annoyed.

What’s do you prefer, the freelance work or the full time employee?

I’ve been working exclusively with 37signals for 8+ years now.

Your personnel projects and goals for 2010?

Sticking with it. Continuous improvement.

Who’s Less?

The beautiful and charming Steven Bristol and I founded Less, a company that builds simple web based applications for your business.

Do you have a Brand?

Yes we have a brand, we are our brand.

How do you choose the idea and the colors in any new project?

To make decisions we spin “The Wheel of Destiny” or consult with the “Magic 8-Ball”.

What does your typical day look like?

Every morning, I wake up, brush my teeth, drink some coffee and it’s all down hill from there.

What are the tools you couldn’t live without?

Gmail, Textmate, Firefox, Git

What do you do in your free time?

Play with my kids, take pictures, go out on the boat and occasionally save the world, if the weather is nice.

Current favorite apps?

Favorite App..hmmm maybe Twitter, maybe Tweetie, Designersmusic is rad too.

What OSs do you prefer?

Windows 7…not.  OSX, we’re a mac only shop.

Small pic for your Workplace?

You might see me in your local coffee shop, throw’n up gang signs like this:

Favorite: Languages, JS Framework?

We’re passionate about Ruby on Rails and Jquery.

The things or source that inspired you?

People inspire me, I’m addicted to those inspirational videos on YouTube. I think I enjoy crying.

What’s do you prefer, the freelance work or the full time employee?

We still do a bit of “consluting” as I like to call it. I can’t work for anyone, I have “a problem with authority”.

Your personnel projects and goals for 2010?

Goals…hmmm I really don’t have any. I want my kids to be healthy, my family and friends to feel loved, the users of our apps to feel appreciated and to keep doing what I love.

Who’s Fabio Akita?

Do you have a Brand?

How do you choose the idea and the colors in any new project?

What does your typical day look like?

What are the tools you couldn’t live without?

What do you do in your free time?

Current favorite apps?

What OSs do you prefer?

Small pic for your Wokrplace ?

Favorite: Colors, Font, Languages (PHP, Ruby), JS Framework ?

The things or source that inspired you ?

What’s do you prefer, the freelance work or the full time employee?

Your personnel projects and goals for 2010?