Editors Note: We have a whole bunch of interviews to get through for March. So for this week we will be publishing one every day.
We are start off with Rails core contributor and new Thought Worker
Dan Manges
Q: What is your connection to Ruby on Rails?
When I started working for JPMorganChase I did web development in PHP. In the fall of 2005 Joshua Schairbaum, my colleague, started using Rails and really liked it. He encouraged me to check it out, and soon we were using Rails for all our small projects. After successful delivery of several small web apps, Josh was able to sell Rails to upper management, and we now use Rails for a very large access administration application.
Q: What Rails projects are you working on right now?
I work on the application mentioned above, and I do some freelancing. Although I currently do not work on any public Rails applications, I released a plugin, QueryStats, to assist with awareness of database queries in Rails development.
Q: How did you first get involved contributing to the Rails source?
I first contributed to the Rails source by working on small bug fixes. In addition to fixing bugs I encounter when using Rails, I will occasionally look through the list of open defects, and if I read a description of a problem regarding Rails code I know very well, I will fix it and submit a patch.
Q: Tell us about the sort of contribution you made during the contest.
I submitted the patch to support ranges in ActiveRecord hash conditions, which was applied to the 1.2 branch between 1.2.1 and 1.2.2. I also submitted the patch to support :default => nil in migrations and fixed a bug in ActionController:: Base.exemptfromlayout. My other patches, including bug fixes, small enhancements, and a documentation patch, are still open.
Q: If you worked on the Rails source before the contest what kind of contributions have you made?
Before the contest I submitted a patch to fix the problem with countercache reliability. The patch is still open (it needs a little more thought), but I know many developers would like to be able to use countercache without the value becoming incorrect. For more information on this, take a look at ticket #6896.
Q: Tell us a bit about your development environment
At work I use Windows XP on Dell laptop with a 1.86 GHz Intel Centrino CPU and 2 GB of RAM. I use Eclipse with RadRails.
At home I use OSX with a 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo and 1 GB of RAM. Textmate is the editor I use on OSX.
Regarding libraries, I really like RSpec for testing.
Q: What is the best part about contributing to the Rails source?
The best part is giving back to the community. Also, by looking into bugs in Trac and looking at the source code, you gain a better understanding of how Rails works. By watching Trac activity, a developer will become more aware of many of the known bugs in Rails, which is a great benefit when debugging a problem in an application.
Q: With 1.2 released we are now looking forward to 2.0. What kind of features and functionality do you think we are likely to see in this release?
A few months ago I would have complained about fixtures, but now I rely more on mocking and stubbing. I would like to see some changes to migrations and better ActiveRecord efficiency. Other than that, I'm looking forward to seeing what the core team has been thinking up.
Q: Closing words
Thank you to CDBaby for sponsoring the Hackfest, I will look forward to seeing everybody at RailsConf. I would like to mention a plugin that my coworker, John Andrews, developed: Scope Out. You can read about it on my blog post or on the project home page, but in short: I think almost everybody should be using this in their models. On a more personal note, I just left my position with JPMorganChase to join ThoughtWorks, and you can check out my blog at dcmanges.com.
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