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Hello everyone, and thank you for coming out early. I know there were some parties last night, so congratulations on making it here. I'm Greg, and this is Carlos Souza. You're listening to Ruby Five—no, not really. I thought I'd put that out there for those of you who listen.
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We’re doing the Ruby Hero Awards today. In case you're not familiar, the Ruby Hero Awards are put together to give recognition to individuals who deserve it but don't often receive it. This year marks our seventh year, having started in 2008, which was around the third RailsConf when we began the Ruby Hero Awards.
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In 2013, we honored Ruby Heroes, and if you're not familiar, you might recognize some of the names. This picture shows the 2012 Ruby Heroes, and what's fascinating is that many of these individuals are well-known now, but at the time they were just working hard in the community. Some members became part of the Rails core team and made significant impacts in our lives, including those of you in this room. They were recognized on stage here at the Ruby Hero Awards before they were widely known.
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A lot of these honorees helped establish foundations for Ruby as we know it. Many of them are educators, not just coders, and their contributions are invaluable. We do this as part of our podcast, Ruby Five, which is a twice-weekly Ruby news podcast and newsletter. Each week, we highlight people who are creating new libraries for Ruby and Rails. We’ve noticed that certain individuals repeatedly go above and beyond, producing educational products or libraries that often don't receive the recognition they deserve. This motivated us to organize an awards ceremony to give these deserving individuals a round of applause and recognition.
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This year, we had 631 nominations. It’s important to note that it's not a popularity contest. We consult with previous Ruby Heroes to consider nominations, and they together vote for the recipients of the six awards visible on stage. So today, we have six Ruby Hero Awards to give out, and we hope all the winners are present.
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As I collected information about these nominees, I realized that four of them are truly impressive contributors to the open source community. Before we get to that, I want to extend my gratitude to Ruby Central for letting us host this event and support us in this effort. Also, thanks to everyone who participated in the voting process. If anyone is here who voted for the Ruby Heroes or nominated individuals, you are awesome—thank you!
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Thanks also to Code School, who helped fund these awards. If you’re not familiar, we have a booth just down there where we offer a few courses authored by Carlos on Rails 4. If you need to get up to speed on Rails, make sure to check those out later.
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Before we proceed, I want to highlight how essential it is to keep our community strong. One powerful way to motivate individuals is through positive reinforcement. I encourage you, throughout the conference, to take a moment to thank anyone who has made a positive impact in your experience, whether it’s someone giving a presentation or a creator of an open source library you’ve used. A bit of appreciation goes a long way, especially for those who work diligently but might not get the immediate feedback about their impact.
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Now, if you hear your name called today, I invite you to come up on stage to accept your award. We’ll have a traditional group photo after everyone has been called, and we also have boxes for the awards ready to go.
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Now, I’ll hand it over to Carlos to announce our first Ruby Hero!
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The first Ruby Hero looks like this on GitHub and has made notable contributions to education, particularly through the Ruby Rogues podcast, which airs weekly. She is also a prominent conference speaker, helps teach at G-School, and has created an amazing project called exorcism.io that helps people practice coding and testing. People have said she inspired them to participate in open source projects and dedicated her time to teaching others how to write clean, beautiful code. The hero I'm speaking of is Katrina Owen.
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Let's move on to our second hero. This individual also has a GitHub presence and has been nominated several years for the Ruby Heroes. Over the years, he has contributed significantly to the Ruby community. If you’ve been in the community, you likely know his name from his impactful conference talks and the meaningful work he’s done.
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One of his admirable initiatives involves helping children learn Ruby through Kids Ruby, as well as his efforts with events like Kids Code Camp. Recently, he has committed a significant amount of time to a library called R2, which allows Ruby to interact with various robots. People praise him for championing Ruby and making it accessible to young programmers. The person I’m talking about is Ron Evans.
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The third Ruby Hero looks like this on GitHub as well. He helps maintain the boxing project, which simplifies the setup of local development environments. Additionally, he's a maintainer for the Simple Form gem, which many of us utilize. As one of the top contributors to the Rails core team, his efforts are crucial to the community.
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People remark on his remarkable contributions to projects like Rails and Simple Form, dedicating countless hours to improve our community's tools. Some consider him a second Tender Love in impact. I am speaking of Raphael Mendonça França.
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Now, on to our fourth hero. He likely has the most commits to his name, as he is the main maintainer of the Twitter Ruby gem. He has also developed and maintained the Twitter command line client. His work on Rails Admin is noteworthy, and during my research, I was intrigued to go back to the first commits of libraries he has worked on.
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Despite a humorous digression referring to PHP, I want to emphasize how significant his contributions to various open-source projects really are. Whether it’s Bundler, Rubygems, or Thor, his hard work behind the scenes has proven essential. The individual I’m referring to here is Eric Michaels Ober.
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Next, our fifth hero. This individual has worked on the Purgen library, which is a Ruby Minecraft plugin. He has also been a prominent contributor to the JRuby project for an extensive time. Several quotes from peers highlight his contributions to JRuby and his willingness to tackle complex problems.
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The final hero I’d like to announce is renowned for creating approximately 150 gems that many in this room have undoubtedly used over the years. Notable libraries include Map, Dow, and many others improving Ruby's capabilities. One specific project, the Testy library, stands out for its approach to simplifying the testing framework, and he's gained recognition in the Ruby community for his unique style and contributions.
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He has made a significant impact not just with his libraries but through his overall presence in the community. The individual I am discussing is Rit Howard.
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As we conclude, it's my honor to announce the recipients of the 2014 Ruby Hero Awards today. Thank you all for being here!