Pratik Naik is a long-standing Rails contributor.
He has won the Hackfest on multiple occasions.
Originally from India he currently lives and works in London and is a regular attendee to the Ruby users group in the city.
Pratik is also best known in the community for creating the popular Rails blog aggregation site Planet Ruby on Rails
Q: What is your connection to Ruby on Rails?
I started my career with Oracle India, and spent almost 2 years there working on several customer facing internal web apps using perl/mod_perl. And 2 years on perl were enough to build a love/hate relationship, so while looking at new technologies/solutions I came across ruby/rails and fell in love with it instantly. And now I've been working professionally with Rails for almost a year and half.
Q: Tell us about the sort of contribution you made during the contest.
Apart from minor ActiveRecord/ActionPack fixes and pluginizing some functionalities, my major patches were for refactoring of render methods and association callbacks.
Q: How did you first get involved contributing to the Rails source?
In the past, I had made some contributions to mod_perl project. And I first got involved contributing to rails in a very short time after starting to work on edge rails. Contributing to rails is a lot easier than people ( mainly those who are new to rails ) usually think. Everything in rails is pure ruby after all. #rails-contrib irc channel is probably the best ( and fastest ) way to get core related help and finding people to review your patch.
Q: Tell us about your development environment
Mac and big screens.
Q: Rails 2.0 and beyond - where next?
I think the next steps would be to work towards making rails thread-safe and cleaning up some fugly code. And also have rails run smoothly on next major stable ruby release in 1.9 series, as it has major performance enhancements over 1.8.x.
Q: Closing words
I've been meaning to bring back to life my first rails project - FreeOnRails, which is hibernating at the moment due to my time crunches. It's a project for providing quality free rails hosting to those in need. Interested people can join the mailing list where I'd be posting all the further updates.
Apart from that, you can usually catch me in #rails-contrib and #rubyonrails irc channels (nick : lifofifo) or lrug meets. I also try to blog regularly at http://m.onkey.org
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