Engine Yard <3s Fukuoka Ruby

Fukuoka is home to Japan’s largest group of Ruby developers and a burgeoning tech industry. Recently, the Fukuoka Ruby Group traveled to San Francisco and the Peninsula, visiting a variety of technology companies. Engine Yard was fortunate to have Yukihiro Matsumoto, better know as Matz, and the Fukuoka Ruby Group visit the Engine Yard offices for a presentation and Q&A session. Engine Yard’s SVP of Engineering, Paul Melmon, gave a presentation to the group, followed by a Q&A with myself and engineer, Shai Rosenfeld, and a tour of Engine Yard’s HQ. After the tour I sat down with Matz to ask him a short round of questions on the topic of Ruby…

Bryan: Thank you for taking the time to visit us and thank you to the Fukuoka Ruby group as well. What does the future hold for Ruby as a language?

Matz: We are now in the Ruby 2.0 era. And in this stage the core team is going to focus on improving performance and reducing consumption (compute resources). The core team is currently working to add more support in Ruby 2.2 regarding performance.

Bryan: Are there any plans to capitalize on the enterprise space with Ruby that is held more by .Net?

Matz: I think the primary motivation behind enterprise penetration is not the technical reason that the core team is focusing on with Ruby. However they cannot drop off Ruby because of the lack of features, but after that it is up to them (the industry) to use these new tools.

Bryan: What types of integration do you see being most useful with Ruby in the future?

Matz: The whole purpose of Ruby as a language is to help programmers be productive and effective. We are going to adjust these things in the future to help add features to help programmers find bugs earlier or quicker, and maybe add some kind of integrated testing, but this is still a vague idea.

Bryan: What advice do you have for new programmers who are interested in learning Ruby?

Matz: Try out small programs. It’s easy to write small programs and in Ruby, typically, you can do better and bigger in terms of practice. You can write down a web service in say 30 minutes using Ruby on Rails, so that you can do bigger things with less code. Then writing code and doing a lot of things makes you feel like you accomplished great things, so that feeling will motivate themselves to be a better programmer. It’s an important factor to become a good programmer and building on things early.

We at Engine Yard were extremely grateful for this opportunity to connect with the Fukuoka Ruby Group and Matz on our shared interest and respect for Ruby!