Josh Peek is a highly active contributor to the Rails framework. He came 1st in the June Hackfest and has been the most active contributor to the framework since the start of the year.
WWR caught up with Josh to find out more:
Q: What is your connection to Ruby on Rails?
About 2 years ago, I was originally trying to code a weblog/cms app in PHP for my own personal site when I heard about Rails. After reading all the buzz and seeing the original "weblog in 15 minutes" screencast I decided to pick it up and write my blogging engine with it. After that, I feel in love with Ruby and have been coding ever since.
This fall I'll be staring my first year at college, at DePaul University in Chicago. I've been doing freelance work over the summer and I hope to have time to do some work during school.
Q: Tell us about the sort of contribution you made during the contest.
I've been working on improving rails test coverage with rcov. I added patches to fixed various defects and bugs. With the help of Coda Hale, we added Method Not Allowed support which returns a 405 when a resource does not support a HTTP method. My favorite patches where the ones that speed up the process of deprecated old code. I wrote the patch that finally made with_scope protected (after lots of debate). I also wrote the plugin versions of scaffolding and pagination, so we could deprecate them as well.
Q: How did you first get involved contributing to the Rails source?
I'm probably the first person to take on the role of the "Trac Garden". Right after RailsConf 2007, I've began working with Jeremy Kemper (bitsweat) on some ways to cleanup Trac. The new policy is to close patches that aren't ready for submission. So if its missing unit tests, needs documentation or some refactoring, it stays closed until its ready. This really helps cleanup Trac and creates a nice queue for the Core to look through and commit.
I usually hang out in #rails-contrib and read the Core mailing list.
Q: Tell us about your development environment
I'm running a 2 GHz MacBook Pro with a nice large Cinema Display. I use TextMate as my main editor. Some of my favorite gems included capistrano, mocha, piston, rcov, and ZenTest (autotest).
Q: Rails 2.0 - What kind of features and functionality do you think we are likely to see in this release?
I would mainly like to see things removed by Rails 2.0. Many of the things I wish would be removed are going be "pluginize" by 2.0. I'm glad to see ActionWebService and the "enterprisely" database adapters removed as well. I hope they move to their own repository and not hang around the Rails Trac.
Q: Closing words
I'm always working cool and sometimes strange plugins at http://svn.joshpeek.com/projects/plugins/.
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