Interview with Jeremy Evans, Lead developer of Sequel & Roda

SAN FRANCISCO - Nov. 3, 2022 - PRLog -- Jeremy Evans is the lead developer of the Sequel database library, the Roda web toolkit, the Rodauth authentication framework, and many other Ruby libraries. He is the maintainer of Ruby ports for the OpenBSD operating system, and has contributed to CRuby and JRuby, as well as many popular Ruby libraries. We are happy to present a brand-new interview with Jeremy to our readers.

Hope you enjoy it!

The Interview

Evrone: You became a Ruby committer and received the Ruby prize 2020 with your work on keyword arguments separation. Could you tell us how did it happen, how did you feel about that?

Jeremy: I was overjoyed to both become a Ruby committer and to be the recipient of the RubyPrize in 2020.  In terms of how of those happened, I'll start with becoming a Ruby committer.

I have been contributing patches and bug reports occasionally to Ruby since 2009. However, I started to get more involved with Ruby in early 2019 when hearing about the direction for keyword arguments in Ruby 3. The original proposal for keyword arguments in Ruby 3 was for full separation, so that passing a hash to a method that accepts keywords would raise an error, but also that passing keywords (a hash without braces) to a method that accept an optional hash argument would also raise an error. I thought this proposal went too far, by breaking compatibility with Ruby code that did not use keyword arguments at all. I built a patch on top of the original proposal that was more backwards compatible. I ended up presenting this proposal with Yusuke Endoh at the developer meeting at RubyKaigi 2019. While waiting on a decision from Matz about keyword arguments, I started sending in patches to fix other Ruby bugs, and after quite a few patches, Endoh-san recommended I become a committer, and Matz approved.

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