Announcing the Engine Yard Innovators Awards

Engine Yard is proud to announce the winners of our inaugural Engine Yard Innovators Awards! Engine Yard is honoring folks from all across the community for their efforts that have helped make our lives as developers, sys admins and analysts better, both at Engine Yard and around the world. Many people in the community have made contributions, but these Innovators are people who have been wildly creative and changed the way we work with their tireless efforts.

Our Ruby category winner is Luis Lavena. Luis is known for his incredible work with RubyInstaller and RailsInstaller for Windows. He understood the struggles of Windows users being on the edge of Ruby development without being able to have the ease of entry other OS platforms offered. To solve the problem, Luis took up the call and made it possible to start using Ruby and Rails easily with one-click installation and ample documentation.

Our PHP category winner is Elizabeth Marie Smith. A core contributor to PHP on Windows as well as being the founder of PHPMentoring.org and co-founder of PHPWomen.org, Elizabeth embodies dev evangelism and the spirit of inclusiveness for anyone looking to enter into tech fields, especially PHP.

Our Open Source category winner is Hiro Asari. Hiro is well known for his skills as a developer and he made a bigger contribution to the community when he became part of the JRuby team. Presenting on JRuby around the country, Hiro is an open source advocate and trouble-shooter extraordinaire.

Our DevOps category winner is Nathen Harvey. A devops guru who has been travelling from conference to conference evangelizing the use of Chef, Nathen is known for his “Rails With Chef” proficiency. He works to help others understand the importance of backend compatibility.

Each of our inaugural winners have received special awards from Engine Yard and will be featured in upcoming blog posts to share their work and plans moving forward. Anyone has a chance to be an Engine Yard Innovator, it’s just a matter of taking the initiative to go above and beyond the ordinary.