James Nolan Weirich (November 18, 1956 – February 19, 2014) was a
software developer, speaker, teacher, and contributor to the
Ruby programming language community. He was active in the Ruby community worldwide, speaking at events in Asia, South America, Europe, and the United States.
Among his many contributions he created the popular
Rake
Rake may refer to:
* Rake (stock character), a man habituated to immoral conduct
* Rake (theatre), the artificial slope of a theatre stage
Science and technology
* Rake receiver, a radio receiver
* Rake (geology), the angle between a feature on a ...
build tool for Ruby.
Work
Weirich was the Chief Scientist at Neo Innovation, working at Neo's Cincinnati office. He also built and maintained many
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
tools, the most popular being Rake and Builder with 74 and 54 million downloads, respectively.
Rake
Rake may refer to:
* Rake (stock character), a man habituated to immoral conduct
* Rake (theatre), the artificial slope of a theatre stage
Science and technology
* Rake receiver, a radio receiver
* Rake (geology), the angle between a feature on a ...
is a build tool for automating tasks in Ruby. It is one of the most widely downloaded Ruby Gems, downloaded more than 481 million times and has been included with
Apple OS X
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...
since at least version 10.7.
Builderis a tool for creating structured
XML data through Ruby.
RubyGems is package management tool for Ruby programs and libraries. Ryan Leavengood is credited with creating the very first RubyGems project in 2001, but it did not gain enough momentum to take off. In November 2003 with the need for a proper package manager growing,
Richard Kilmer,
Chad Fowler, David Black, Paul Brannan, and Jim Weirich got together at RubyConf 2003 in Austin and built today's RubyGems, which shares a name, but not the original codebase.
Ruby Koansis a learning tool to teach people the Ruby Programming Language through a series of small exercises.
rspec-givenis an extension to the popular Ruby testing framework
RSpec that enables
given/when/then notation when writing specs.
Git Immersionis a guided tour that walks through the fundamentals of Git, inspired by the premise that to know a thing is to do it.
ArgusA Ruby API for controlling a Parrot AR Drone.
Presentations
Weirich was a popular conference speaker known for making very difficult topics understandable. An archive o
29 more recent talksis available on the Confreaks site; some notable talks are linked below:
The Grand Unified Theory of Software- Rails Underground 2009
SOLID Ruby- RubyNation 2010
Power Rake- Steel City Ruby 2012
Y Not? Adventures in Functional Programming- Ruby Conference 2012
Kata and Analysis- BostonRB Monthly Meeting - February 2013
Why Aren't You Using Ruby- RubyConf Uruguay 2013
RubyMotion- CincyCocoaDev April 2013
Decoupling from Rails- CincyRB October 2013
Ruby, threads, events... and Flying Robots!- CincyRB May 2013
Personal life
Weirich grew up in Shipshewana, Indiana, graduating from Westview Junior - Senior High School in 1975. He went on to graduate from
Indiana University
Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana.
Campuses
Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI.
* Indiana Univers ...
in 1979 with a degree in physics. He lived in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Weirich was active in the Ruby community worldwide, and especially in Cincinnati, participating in the local
agile development, Ruby, and functional programming user groups. At meetings, he often gave talks and was widely acclaimed for the clarity and quality of his presentations.
News of Weirich's death was met with hundreds of tributes and thanks via comments o
his final GitHub commit which includes a special banner added by
GitHub
GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, co ...
. The 1.9.3-p545 release of the Ruby programming language was dedicated to his memory.
See also
*
List of computer scientists
This is a list of computer scientists, people who do work in computer science, in particular researchers and authors.
Some persons notable as programmers are included here because they work in research as well as program. A few of these people ...
*
List of programmers
This is a list of programmers notable for their contributions to software, either as original author or architect, or for later additions. All entries must already have associated articles.
A
* Michael Abrash – program optimization and x8 ...
References
External links
Weirich's personal blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Weirich, Jim
1956 births
2014 deaths
American computer programmers