Kamal Fariz hails from Malaysia, an avid Ruby, Rails, and Apple fan. He has recently handed in his notice at a big technology consulting company to join an agile startup.
In this Hackfest winner interview we find out about his journey to Rails, contributions and much more.
Q: What is your connection to Ruby on Rails?
My first experience with Rails was before it was Rails, in the form of Instiki. I was looking for a wiki for internal use on a client project, and liked how easy it was to setup. Before this, I was a commiter on TiddlyWikiRemote, so naturally I wanted to check out how it was built. At that time, I remember Ruby syntax being weird and at the same time impressed by Madeleine, the library DHH used for persisting objects (pre-ActiveRecord?). Not long after, Ruby on Rails was announced, the first screencast was published, the first impression at early TextMate from said screencast was made and Tobi was still doing one-on-one tutoring of Rails. My understanding of Rails was so-so at that point as I had put off learning Ruby but I finally gave in about 1.5-2 years ago and have never looked back.
I'm currently employed as a consultant at a big, traditional technology consulting company. For the past three years, I've been doing enterprisey things with Java within the telco industry but for not much longer. I recently tendered my resignation and will be joining RSB, an agile Malaysian startup, as Lead Software Developer in August. We are building next-generation location-based web apps on Rails.
Q: Tell us about the sort of contribution you made during the contest.
Two of my patches were committed for the very first time in June, a week before the announcement of the June Hackfest. I had a few more patches sitting in the Rails Trac for a few months already, so I never thought my patches would be accepted anytime soon. Fired up by the real prospect that patches were indeed getting the attention they deserved, I hunted for more patching opportunities.
In summary, I contributed a couple of bug fixes, a couple of test coverage patches, a documentation patch, modernized some existing tests (collection fixtures had just made it in edge) and doing my part in banishing ActionWebService. A total of six patches were accepted during the Hackfest. I wrote a self-congratulatory entry on my blog to commemorate it.
Q: How did you first get involved contributing to the Rails source?
I had been involved in the open source community for a while now, but mostly in a bug reporter role in my heydays of being a staunch Debian user. My first actual code contribution had been the TiddlyWikiRemote project. Since then, I've submitted patches to various other projects such as the Spring-IDE plugin for Eclipse and most recently, the awesome has_many_polymorphs plugin by Evan Weaver.
Contributing to Rails was daunting at first, but the combination of the guide on the Rails Trac, Dr Nic's excellent post on the same and various resources on ruby-debug made it easier.
Q: Tell us about your development environment
I use TextMate on a MacBook. I rely on Trac and Subversion hosting by the fine guys at DevjaVu and shell out on cheapish VPS hosting at VPSland. Favorite kit/libraries/plugins right now is the Caboo.se Sample App, RSpec, attachment_fu + image_science, has_many_polymorphs, acts_as_friendly_param and restful_authentication.
Q: Rails 2.0 - What kind of features and functionality do you think we are likely to see in this release?
Wow, I had been using Edge Rails for quite some time that I don't really know how to compare it against the last stable release, 1.2.3. I think apart from more REST, Rails 2.0 will be less in terms new features and more polish. I'm actually looking forward to a rewrite/refactorization of ActiveRecord. DataMapper looks really neat.
Q: Closing words
I recently co-founded the Malaysia Ruby Brigade (Malaysia.rb) to bring together Ruby and Rails enthusiasts from around Malaysia. We've mostly discovered Ruby/Rails independently and it's a nice feeling to reach out to others that share the passion. All we have now is a Malaysia.rb Google Group, Trac/Subversion hosting for a couple of planned community projects and four meetups to date. We are most enthusiastic about a casual multiplayer online game around the theme of the Malaysian Elections (rumored to be Real Soon Now). Currently, it is in the planning stages, but I've been itching to get started so look out for that! Continuing along the theme of giving back to the community, Aizat from Malaysia.rb recently released a mashup that tracks the Malaysian Air Pollution Index.
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