I am Aaron Patterson (tenderlove), Core team member of Ruby and Rails, and Software Engineer at GitHub. Ask me anything!

Hi everybody!

My name is Aaron Patterson, aka "tenderlove". I am a Senior Software Engineer at a small startup company called GitHub. I'm on the Rails Core team, which is the team responsible for developing and maintaining the Rails web framework. I'm also on the Ruby Core team which is the team responsible for developing and maintaining the Ruby language.

I love programming, cats, and cooking (specifically meat curing). I am also a mechanical keyboard enthusiast and amateur / beginning hardware hacker. Please ask me anything!

As some ideas for stuff to talk about:

I've been working on a compacting GC for Ruby so we could talk about that.
I've been looking at speeding up template rendering so we could also talk about that.
Concurrency and parallelism in Ruby
Making stuff with AVR chips
Which mechanical switches are best
Cat stuff
How puns are created

Any Idea about this SO question -

stackoverflow.com/questions/61031735/why-does-rub…

What do you think about Ruby 3x3 ?. Matz had promised to add concurrency support in ruby 3. Do u think this will make significant performance increase?. How about the languages like elixir and go. Will the new ruby performance will catch up the performance of modern languages that are competing for speed.

heya, do you know about the Hanami framework? have you worked with it? what do you think about their approach in terms of structuring apps and software paradigms?

also: i am glad you do the things you do, both on the ruby language, and on the pun twitters. thank you for your contribution :) also: friday hug, on a sunday :Pheya, do you know about the Hanami framework? have you worked with it? what do you think about their approach in terms of structuring apps and software paradigms?

also: i am glad you do the things you do, both on the ruby language, and on the pun twitters. thank you for your contribution :) also: friday hug, on a sunday :P

How do you see Ruby in 5 years?

Since you've been working on GC for Ruby, what do you think about non GC languages like Rust?

How do you value a Software Engineer?

How is it like working in Github, like what do you normally work on? And how do you manage your time to work full time, learn new stuff and contribute to RoR?

So, this is a question involving a pretty harsh background story, so the weak of constitution might want to skip this...

You’ve been warned, so here it goes: Last year on ruby kaigi, I was kind of trotting around about a serious issue, but couldn’t muster the strength to ask you. No, it’s not “will you marry me”, but close in how serious it was.

I seriously needed a cat sticker, but you always seemed to be engaged in important conversations, so when I finally got around asking you for a car sticker, (and of course received it) I put it into my ruby kaigi visitors pass plastic wrapper thingy, but instead of heading straight home and putting it into the hotel save, I went to the Shopify karaoke party.

Long story short, I got drunk and lost the stickers! I know, I know... Please don’t blame me, I was young and I swear someone might have stolen them and sold them on the black cat sticker market.

So, here is my question: if you could, would you go back in time and approach me earlier about the stickers?

What do you think about the importance of communication skills for software developers?

How important it is for you or for the software developers at your level?

What do you think about Elixir?

Thank you for doing the AMA

How did you first contribute to Ruby? In your opinion, what skill and what experience one need to be able to contribute to the Ruby language development?

And, how do you learn Japanese? :D

Hi Aaron Patterson! Thanks for the AMA! A couple of questions:

What would you say to a 20 y.o. you?
What's your best memory of 2018?

What's your thoughts on Rubocop?

Also, what's your thoughts on Robocop?

I saw you at an Elixir conference last year. Was that just for fun or do you have an active interest in Elixir?

Hey Aaron :-)

How do you split (%) your daily routine? Between coding, code reviewing, playing games with your cat 🐱 and studying? (I really try to find a balance between these things).

Cheers,

Hi! Honestly it's really hard. Basically I just made a habit and then stick to it. But, I wake up at 6:30 go to the gym, get home at 8, study for an hour, work until 5 or 6, do some personal projects and cook. I don't always get to do personal projects, so sometimes I have to cut that. The rest is pretty consistent though. I have to pick the things that are important to me and the cut the rest.

Hey Aaron!

Do you have any suggestions for typically-overlooked channels for recruiting experienced Rails talent?

What's that one feature available on Rails but not on other frameworks?

Hmmm, good question. I don't know all the frameworks that are out there, but one thing I like about Rails is that it comes with so much just baked in for you where many other frameworks require you to plug things together. I think this good "out of the box" experience is my favorite feature that Rails provides that most other frameworks don't.

What's the best part of being Rails core team member? Who do you admire the most in Rails community?

I guess the best part of being on the Rails core team is that I get to help shape the direction of Rails in the future. I admire many people in the Rails community for different reasons. DHH for his skill to cut through bullshit, Rafael for his patience and selflessness, Eileen for her drive and skill. I try to pick out the good qualities of the people around me and incorporate them in to myself. I feel lucky to be part of such a good community!

Why are there more cat videos than dog videos on the internet?

Ah, probably because cats are super adorable. 😉

HOW DO I START THIS, AM I DOING THIS RIGHT?????

So far, so good. 🤣

It's nice to see the GC is getting improved 💖. There is some research suggesting that using malloc_trim(3) during garbage collection could limit fragmentation too (at the OS level). Do you think this could be combined with a compacting GC in the Ruby VM, and do you have an estimation of how much this would improve mem usage?

Good question! We actually use jemalloc at work, so the OS level fragmentation issues that Hongli pointed out don't really impact us. See this link:

joyfulbikeshedding.com/blog/2019-03-14-what-cause…

I do think that combining this with a compacting GC would be helpful, but it's hard for me to estimate the improvement since it's very application specific. The next thing I want to work on is implementing a "variable width allocator" for Ruby. Right now Ruby's GC can only allocate fixed width slots. That means that things like string are allocated via the OS allocator, and that's what causes the fragmentation. If Ruby's GC could allocate various sizes, then the GC could control the fragmentation as well as compaction at the same time. This would fix the fragmentation issue and also be allocator independent. IOW it wouldn't matter if you use jemalloc or just glibc.

Hi Aaron Patterson , thanks for AMA, Since I love to contribute in open source on github so I want to know about journey to become a developer at Github and also what makes you a better developer ?

It would be very inspiring for me .

Hi! Sure, I can answer this! I've been a professional developer for almost 20 years (I got my first job around December 1999). I first learned about open source because I wanted to learn to program and we couldn't afford to pay for commercial compilers like Borland's C compiler. I think this experience is what really inspired me to be part of the Open Source community. I love programming and would like it if all people had the opportunity to learn to code.

As for getting a job at GitHub, I can't say it was easy. I was programming for 16 years before starting at GitHub, so I had a lot of experience. I applied for a job, and fortunately I was qualified enough to do it!

My best advice for becoming a better developer is to practice. Don't be afraid to make mistakes, just try something and see if it works out. The most important thing to do is look back on the things you've tried and figure out what worked and what didn't. I think those experiences and self reflection make the best developers.

thanks a lot Aaron Patterson, for your reply . It's really great talking to you . Thanks again for sharing your journey .

What do you think about people that say it Ruby is a magic language?

It's only magic if you don't understand how it works. If you take the time to learn, the "how does this work?" magic goes away. However, the magic of the joy of programming remains. 😊

What do you think about future of Concurrency and parallelism in Ruby? How would be that in comparison to current state of concurrency and parallelism in other languages?

Thanks.

Good question, and I could talk about this for a long time (but probably shouldn't). Concurrency and parallelism are tough to get right. Anyone that has written threaded code knows this. Koichi has been working on a concept called "guilds" which I think can be thought of as kind of "actors". The idea is that most concurrency bugs come from mutating shared data. So Guilds don't allow that. If you want to share data, you have to copy it, or you need to make a read-only version of that data. I think one thing that would help push Ruby forward towards a more concurrent / parallel world would be if there was an easy way to declare deeply nested read-only data structures.

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I am Aaron Patterson (tenderlove), Core team member of Ruby and Rails, and Software Engineer at GitHub. Ask me anything!

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