community a better place, by creating the Contributor Covenant and trying incredibly hard to get people, even in the most hostile environments, to adopt it.
— one of the great international Ruby conferences in Tokyo, and he’s the author of many widely used gems like Kaminari, active_decorator, traceroute, database_rewinder, and more.
a million dollars and recruited hundreds of coaches and mentors to get dozens of women into programming and contributing to open source. [...] we can attest that it changes peoples' lives.
and incrementally improving the C Ruby implementation. He wrote YARV, pushed for flonums, implemented partial generation garbage collection, and many many other improvements. All of these things have been the primary drivers of increased performance and better [garbage collection]. His impact is large but his presence is not (at least in much of the world outside Japan).
Ruby developers everywhere. In his appearances on the RubyRogues podcast, [he] always asks interesting questions and provides tidbits of wisdom on Ruby and the state of our community. With [books] like Confident Ruby and Exceptional Ruby, [he] has given guidance to many new Ruby developers on writing clean and readable Ruby code. [He] has inspired me to be not only be a better Ruby developer, but also better Software Developer overall. That's why he's my Ruby Hero.
its existence, which has been responsible for many enterprises using Ruby. He is constantly working on making JRuby better and faster, and regularly going to conferences all over the world showing how you can use Ruby and still have high performance.