This week I’m happy to tell you about a new set of articles which will be appearing here on the Rails blog called “Community Highlights”. This new series will feature people/projects/sites from the Rails community that may deserve a little extra recognition.
This week, we’re going to start with a few people who received awards on stage at Railsconf 2009, this years Ruby Heroes.
Brian Helmkamp
Brian has been a contributing member of the Ruby community for 4 years now, but is most well known for his testing library
Webrat. He’s a contributer to Rails, RSpec, Rubinius, and is a co-author on the recent
RSpec Book. More recently he’s been helping out the Rails core team with Rack:Test, and Rack:Debug.</p>
His Blog: http://www.brynary.com/
Twitter: brynary</div>
Aman Gupta
Aman has taken over the maintenance, new features, and the recent releases of
EventMachine, which is an invaluable tool for writing fast ruby applications. He’s also the author behind
amqp &
xmpp4em gems which are deployed far and wide.</p>
Github: http://github.com/tmm1
Twitter: tmm1</div>
Luis Lavena
Luis has done a lot for the Ruby community in Argentina, but he’s most well known in our community for the work he’s done for windows users maintaining the
One-Click Ruby Installer. Recently he’s put up a
Plegie to help get the windows installer a new home.</p>
His Blog: http://blog.mmediasys.com/
Twitter: luislavena</div>
Pat Allan
Pat is the mastermind behind
Thinking Sphinx which has become a standard when it comes to full-text search in Rails. He is also the author of the excellent
Thinking Sphinx PDF book and one of the founders of
Railscamp, where I hear he makes some killer pancakes.</p>
His Blog: http://freelancing-gods.com/
Twitter: Pat</div>
Dan Kubb
Dan been tirelessly working on one of the hardest Ruby projects around,
DataMapper. He became the official maintainer after Sam Smoot and since then has completely rewritten the test suite to give DataMapper better coverage, has come up with a viable path to completion, and is currently working on making sure DataMapper works great with Rails 3.</p>
Github: http://github.com/dkubb
Twitter: dkubb</div>
John Nunemaker
Although John Nunemaker has released several widely used open source libraries, like
HTTParty and
HappyMapper, his main contribution in my opinion comes from his blog
Rails Tips. Over the past year he’s written an incredible number
educational blog posts on many Ruby and Rails topics.</p>
RailsTips: http://railstips.org/
Twitter: jnunemaker</div>
Those are your six Ruby Hero’s for 2009. If you’re interested you can also watch a video of the award ceremony which talks more about the methodology about how they were chosen and see 5 of these guys receive their awards on stage at Railsconf 2009.