Danish Khan: “we should have a unified way how to contribute back to a project”

Ofer Dak, @startupmania

Khan has made it his mission to help make the Ruby and open source community continue to be awesome by educating maintainers of projects and contributors: “People forget to be nice and helpful to each other, which I feel will just deter people away from the Ruby community and maybe even the open source community as a whole. I feel like because the Ruby community and even the open source community has been growing so much sometimes we've forgotten to instill the core believes that we have into those new people that join”.

What makes the Ruby community stand out?
“we have a lot of passionate people who really want to help teach others to become better Ruby developers.  I think it stems a lot from Matz himself as well as the very early Ruby developers. A core mantra of Ruby is Matz is nice so we are nice (MINASWAN). Given I've notice people forgetting this sometimes I think it helped shaped the community a lot into really being focused on teaching.  Also, having had people like _why I think probably created that focus a lot more. He was very big into creating projects and material that would help people learn how to become developers and specifically Ruby developers”.

What Technologies are you following? Any up and coming projects?
“I think there are a lot of things. I know one that I am excited about that is being worked on by someone at GitHub is the project Swordfish, It is a password management app with support for sharing with groups. It is a pain we have been running into as a company so it excites me a lot since it meets a need that I have. Other than that I find the telephony space interesting. Projects like Adhearsion and Tropo allow developers to create some pretty awesome stuff and of course companies like Twilio just make that process even easier for you”.

Where do you think ruby and rails are headed technology wise?
“Well, personally I am really hoping Rubinius 2.0 gets released soon. Reading all the benchmark posts and hearing about it so much I think it can really help move Ruby forward a lot, but it really needs to be stable and then start getting used by companies in production”.

“In regards to Rails 4 the live streaming looks rather interesting to me. It means that Rails can compete with Node.js. Node.js is pretty popular in the Ruby community so it'll be interesting to see what Ruby developers think about the live streaming. Live streaming means that the ability to send partial responses to the client immediately can be done with Rails now. This was a big thing that I believe made Node.js popular. For example, now with Rails 4 you can actually have progress responses that inform the user about progress. Chat servers can be created or in general web apps that involve a large number of idle but persistent connections”.

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