Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to web standards and

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

projects. In particular he has contributed to the standardization of syndicated web feeds via his involvement with the

Atom Atoms are the basic particles of the chemical elements. An atom consists of a atomic nucleus, nucleus of protons and generally neutrons, surrounded by an electromagnetically bound swarm of electrons. The chemical elements are distinguished fr ...

standard and the Feed Validator web service. He currently holds the position of

Rails Rail or rails may refer to: Rail transport *Rail transport and related matters * Railway track or railway lines, the running surface of a railway Arts and media Film * ''Rails'' (film), a 1929 Italian film by Mario Camerini * ''Rail'' (1967 fi ...

Specialist a
Fly.io
He resides in Raleigh,

North Carolina North Carolina ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, South Carolina to the south, Georgia (U.S. stat ...

Background

Sam Ruby received a B.A. in mathematics from Christopher Newport University, Newport News,

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...

. Ruby was hired immediately out of college by

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

and has worked there since.

Apache Project

Ruby is a former board member of the

Apache Software Foundation The Apache Software Foundation ( ; ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open-source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the ...

. He formerly served as president; Assistant Secretary; Director, Vice President of Legal Affairs; and was the former Chair of the Apache Jakarta Project. He also actively contributes to numerous Apache projects. Notably, he was one of the early

Ant Ants are Eusociality, eusocial insects of the Family (biology), family Formicidae and, along with the related wasps and bees, belong to the Taxonomy (biology), order Hymenoptera. Ants evolved from Vespoidea, vespoid wasp ancestors in the Cre ...

contributors, as well as being the creator of Gump.

Feed Validator

Ruby is the principal maintainer of the Feed validator, which he developed along with Mark Pilgrim. It's able to validate

feeds as well as RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 feeds.

PHP

Ruby also contributed to PHP, in particular to the Java Extension.

Ruby

Sam Ruby has done development in the

Ruby Ruby is a pinkish-red-to-blood-red-colored gemstone, a variety of the mineral corundum ( aluminium oxide). Ruby is one of the most popular traditional jewelry gems and is very durable. Other varieties of gem-quality corundum are called sapph ...

programming language, leading to some confusion between the person's name and the language. However, there is no formal connection—they both just coincidentally have the same name.

Venus

Ruby is the author of Venus, an

/ RSS feed aggregator, the codebase that began as a radical refactoring of the Planet 2.0 feed aggregator in 2006.

html5lib

Ruby is a developer member of the html5lib project, with his primary contribution being the initial port of html5lib to the

programming language.

Standardization efforts

Ruby has been active within various standards development organizations.

ECMA standardization of the .NET Framework CLI

Ruby was the convener of the ECMA TC49 group that standardized the

Common Language Infrastructure The Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) is an open specification and technical standard originally developed by Microsoft and standardized by International Organization for Standardization, ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC (ISO/ ...

for

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

's .NET Framework.

Atom

The project which eventually became the

web feed standard was started by a blog posting by Sam Ruby in 2002 entitled "what makes a log entry". This blog posting eventually became a wiki project which acted as a rallying point for people looking to improve upon the frozen RSS format. Sam Ruby was the secretary of the

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...

AtomPub working group. This working group completed RFC 4287, the

format specification ("The Atom Syndication Format"), in December 2005 and RFC 5023, "The Atom Publishing Protocol", in October 2007.

ECMAScript

Ruby is a member of the

ECMAScript ECMAScript (; ES) is a standard for scripting languages, including JavaScript, JScript, and ActionScript. It is best known as a JavaScript standard intended to ensure the interoperability of web pages across different web browsers. It is stan ...

technical committee (ECMAScript TC39); his primary contribution to the group is in driving the effort to add Decimal support to ECMAScript.

HTML5

Ruby was an early adopter of

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

, and has offered a number of concrete proposals which were subsequently incorporated into the HTML5 draft. He has been appointed co-chair of the W3C's HTML Working Group from 5 January 2009.

Bibliography

*''Agile Web Development with Rails 5'' (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2016) (with Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson) *''Agile Web Development with Rails 4'' (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2013) (with Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson) *''RESTful Web APIs'' (O'Reilly Publishing, 2013) (with Leonard Richardson and Mike Amundsen) *''Agile Web Development with Rails 3.2'' (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2011) (with Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson) *''Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition'' (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2009) (with Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson) *''RESTful Web Services'' (O'Reilly Publishing, 2007) (with Leonard Richardson)

References

Sources

*
Web services visionary
' - an interview with Sam Ruby (IBM developerworks) *
Sam Ruby on the O'Reilly Network
' *
SamRuby page on Atom Wiki
' - accessed February 22, 2006. *

- from XML Conference and Expo 2003.

External links

Intertwingly
- Sam Ruby's

weblog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

(the name is a reference to

Ted Nelson Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms ''hypertext'' and ''hypermedia'' in 1963 and published them in 1965. According to his 1997 ''Forbes'' p ...

's coinage " intertwingularity").
Feed Validator
- Sam Ruby's feed validator for Atom and RSS. {{DEFAULTSORT:Ruby, Sam American bloggers American computer scientists American computer programmers Christopher Newport University alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) IBM employees Open source advocates