Juanjo Bazán heralds from Spain. He works for Cafelink focusing on usability and building a wide range of software, from web applications to scientific simulators.
In this interview find out about his experience during the August 2007 Hackfest, how he got started with Rails and where he sees it going to next.
Q: What is your connection to Ruby on Rails?
I tried Rails a couple of years ago when a friend told me about the buzz about Rails. I had been programming mostly in Java since 1999 and I was already used to object oriented programming, MVC frameworks and OR mappings so I found Rails and its conventions really useful and decide to learn more ruby.
Now I use ruby/rails professionally almost fulltime (still teaching Java in an IT-college in Madrid) and currently I'm involved in different projects with great people doing cool rails code in cafelink, tractis or palabea.
Q: Tell us about the sort of contribution you made during the contest.
During the contest I contributed patches and little fixes in ActionPack, ActionSupport, ActionMailer and ActiveRecord. Most of them were little improvements in utility classes, things like new methods on the time class, better xml request parsing or trying to kill some bugs in the mailer lib. Aditionally a couple of doc patches from past months were commited during the contest. With the new contribution system I also spend some time reviewing other people's patches and commenting them.
Q: How did you first get involved contributing to the Rails source?
When you are using an opensource tool often and are familiar with its code at some point contributing becomes natural. I watched a Ryan Bates' railscast about contributing and started the easy way: improving documentation. Is a good way to understand the contribution process and to learn where you can get help, like the #rails-contrib irc channel. Once you are contributing fixes probably the hardest thing is exploring the rails code structure, with the code of most of the classes being distributed in many files.
Q: Tell us about your development environment
My dev box is a 3000+ AMD booting both Ubuntu and XP. I use RadRails as coding enviroment for Rails projects, helped by other usual tools like trac, subversion, autotest, firebug, paper and pen. The plugins I use more often probably are those related with common tasks like attachmentfu, restfulauthentication (or actsas_autenthicated) or annotatemodels. Recently I'm playing with haml for the views and trying to improve my skills with rspec and the new capistrano.
Q: Rails 2.0 - What kind of features and functionality do you think we are likely to see in this release?
With a preview release already out, is nice to see not only the expected cleaning and pluginization of the 2.0 code but also some significant changes. Maybe there are not big new concepts but definitively there are some nice improvements: sexy migrations, the namespaced rest routes, caching of queries and the HTTP basic authentication module are really useful. I also like the new convention for naming views to use diferent render engines easily. Now I'm fearing the loads of deprecation warnings :)
Q: Closing words
I would like to encourage everyone to participate contributing to rails, sharing ideas and joining the great rails community. I'm part of the organization of the annual Spanish Rails Conference. It was a great success last year and it has become the major rails event of the spanish community, so if you are near Madrid next november don't miss it, I'll see you there.
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