Summary: Gregory Brown is a longtime member of the Ruby community. His contributions to the community include his recent involvement in the RubyGems discussions, Ruby Best Practices, the Prawn library, and Ruby Mendicant University. Ruby Mendicant University is a free online school for software developers. It’s a blended teaching and mentoring program that helps people improve their coding skills. It’s aimed toward intermediate level programmers. The “RubyGems uprising” is something that Greg stepped in and opened up some dialog about the direction and movement of the RubyGems project. The future is looking bright and the public management of the project is much better. Greg has contributed to open source through the Prawn library. He responded to Brandon Hays’ query about getting involved in open source software and gave us some pointers about getting involved and managing open source projects. One thing that stood out was when he talked about not taking feedback on your open source project personally. It’s really eye opening to consider that when people deprecate or remove features from a project like RubyGems, it may be so that things can move forward in a meaningful way. Finally, we talked about the Ruby Best Practices book, the process of technical book writing, and the process of teaching and learning programming. Greg has given a lot of thought to how and why we learn to program.
