Noel Rappin Chimes In: Why Ruby matters to Chime
Noel Rappin joined Chime a year ago and leads the I ❤️ Ruby team, which is intended to champion both Ruby tools and Ruby practices throughout Chime Engineering. He’s been a technical writer for a while, previously having written such books as Rails Test Prescriptions and Modern Front-End Development with Rails.
Noel recently released a new book — an updated edition of Programming Ruby, which Ruby developers generally call “The Pickaxe Book.” (It’s one of the main book-length introductions to the Ruby language for those unfamiliar with it.) While the first edition came out in 2001, there hasn’t been a new edition since 2013 — until now! Ruby has changed a lot in the past decade, so he’s been working on an update of the book, which will be released on October 26 as part of the Pragmatic Press early access program.
We sat down with Noel to learn more about his work with and love of Ruby, his role at Chime, and his new book! Read on to hear what he had to say.
All things Ruby
Can you tell us about your first introduction to Ruby?
My first introduction to Ruby was the original Pickaxe book in 2001 — I had heard about Ruby on some mailing lists and bought the book to explore the new language. While I was interested in it, I actually wasn’t able to use it for anything work-related for several years.
Why have you chosen Ruby as the focus of your career?
I was eventually able to start working in Ruby when Ruby on Rails became successful in the mid-2000s. At the time, I was working as a consultant, and Ruby was a really great way to build successful projects quickly. Eventually, I got more involved with the extended Ruby community through conferences, writing, and other activities. I found the community to be very welcoming, very interested in learning and self-development, and very committed to working on tools to make development easier.
What do you love about it as a language?
I love its expressiveness and flexibility. Ruby is designed to be easy to write and to make developers happy. Beyond the language itself, I also love the ecosystem, which is full of useful tools, and the community, which emphasizes inclusion.
Tell me about your new book — it’s the new edition of Programming Ruby, right? Why is it an important book and why did you want to update it?
Programming Ruby was the first English-language book about Ruby. It was originally published in 2001 and was written by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, who were already well-known developers because of their book The Pragmatic Programmer. For about a dozen years, through four versions and a third co-author, Programming Ruby was the gold standard for new developers learning Ruby. But the last version came out in 2013, and Ruby releases a new version every year — and the Ruby tooling ecosystem changes even faster than that.
As I started onboarding Chime engineers through our Ruby courses, I realized just how long it had been since the book got a reboot. I also realized, somewhat to my own surprise, that I was potentially in a position to do something about it. So I asked the editors at Pragmatic if they were interested in having the book updated, and they asked me to submit a proposal, and after some back-and-forth with the original authors, here we are…
What’s new in this edition?
The biggest additions are just catching up with changes in the language and the surrounding tools. There are all kinds of features being used daily by Ruby developers that weren’t around in 2013, from big new language features like pattern matching to tools like Bundler.
There’s also been a change in the audience. Developers coming to Ruby are more likely to already know Python and JavaScript, and less likely to know C++ and Perl, so some of the descriptions were rewritten to better reflect changing expectations of what the reader might already know.
What has been your favorite development or change in Ruby over the years?
I think the most important changes have been in the tooling. Bundler has been around for a while, but with Bundler the process of getting started on an existing code base went from “this takes a frustrating entire day” to “this takes five minutes.”
What did you learn while writing the book — about writing or about Ruby?
I’ve learned about a lot of somewhat obscure Ruby special cases that you kind of need to know to describe how things work. The book also gave me an excuse to go on a deep dive into Ruby’s newest features, like pattern matching, and the ractor tool for threading that I hadn’t needed to know before.
Ruby + Chime
Why did you decide to join Chime?
I was impressed by the mission focus of the engineering team, and the people I spoke to were very friendly and were able to talk about what I might be able to do for Chime engineering and our Ruby practice. I was excited to be an in-house Ruby expert at Chime — marrying my expertise in the language with the mission-driven approach of the engineering team.
Why does Chime use Ruby?
A lot of Chime’s back-end is built using Ruby on Rails, a web framework that takes advantage of Ruby’s flexibility and expressiveness to make it easy to do all the things that are common to web applications. It’s a great language and environment for building web applications, for building business logic, and for developer productivity.
Tell me about the I ❤️ Ruby team at Chime.
The I ❤️ Ruby team is here to provide resources for learning Ruby, improving Ruby practice, onboarding engineers new to Chime, provide tooling and support for expert Ruby engineers at Chime to build amazing services more quickly, reliably, and easily, and keep an eye out for new tools and practices that could improve Ruby development at Chime.
What are you excited about when it comes to the future of Ruby at Chime?
I’m excited about building a culture of continuous improvement at Chime, and where we have a set of useful tools for tasks that are common across teams that make it easy for our Ruby teams to build powerful software quickly and sustainably.
Check out Noel’s new book here!
