Interview with Thomas Enebo

Rupak: What are the reasons behind the move to EngineYard? Thomas: Engine Yard is a very highly respected Ruby (and Rails) company. When they approached us they pointed out that JRuby could be better represented by a smaller more focused company than a larger one where Ruby is not a primary focus. They also were willing to include Nick Sieger as a Full-Time JRuby developer. So more resources and more focus. Very compelling... Another benefit of Engine Yard will be agility in reacting to business opportunities. EY is not so large that they cannot quickly react to a changing market. If there is a good opportunity to offer commercial JRuby support or JRuby training, then I am confident that EY will act swiftly on those opportunities.  Rupak: You mentioned elsewhere the uncertainty after Sun’s acquisition by Oracle. What related Sun initiatives do you feel may be in a similar situation? Thomas: Big companies merging always have their share of tough decisions. Perhaps if two technologies overlap too much they may end up cancelling whole projects or partially merging those technologies together. I think overlaps is where most of the layoffs will come...but then again what do I know? I am not Oracle and I really have no idea what they might be interested in. Perhaps a particular overlapped technology at Sun will be more interesting than what they currently have at Oracle. Maybe some Oracle employees will get laid off. Maybe they will “double down” and more aggressively develop that part of the business. It is difficult to guess on how a large company will make decisions. I certainly don’t want to make any predictions since I would hate for them to come true. Especially, since I know many engineers at Sun and I would hate to jinx their chances. Rupak: What type of support will you get from EngineYard that wasn’t available before? How would that affect the future of JRuby? Thomas: I touched on this a little bit in 1, but I will add a little more... EY is growing the full-time developers on our team to three. So 50% more JRuby developer goodness. On top of that I am sure that we will be getting help on making better documentation and at least some level of support for JRuby users. The fact that we are joining a Ruby company is important since it also means we will have access to Ruby experts and people who understand how to support Ruby in a cloud environment. Also access to Rails committers like Yehuda Katz. And these last few points should remind us that Engine Yard has a great reputation in the Ruby and Rails community. This will help expand our reach within the Rails community. I hope this announcement will help give Ruby users another reason to consider investigating JRuby. Rupak: EngineYard started to offer JRuby hosting recently. Will you be part of that or is your time dedicated to further JRuby development? Thomas: We will still be working on JRuby itself, but we will be helping as needed with any discovered problems or missing functionality in JRuby. Largely, the problems that Engine Yard may run into for a hosting service are the same problems that other JRuby users will run into. Rupak: What things should the community expect from the JRuby team after this move? What are your expectations or needs from the community? Thomas: Compatibility and performance improvements should always be expected from our development activities....but I think this move is going to give us more focus on sanding and polishing some of the rough edges of JRuby. Documentation, extra steps that are not required by C Ruby, etc... I am hoping this move will help expand the Ruby and JRuby communities and this in turn will help us get more bug reports and success stories; which in turn will help expand the Ruby and JRuby communities...and so on :) Rupak: Would you like to add anything else for our readers? Thomas: In the next year we also plan on courting Java developers more by making improvements which makes it easier for Java developers to start using Rails without having to “start over” with their codebase. I think it is important to grow the size of the Ruby and Rails communities and Java is the 800 pound gorilla in the room. Getting more Java programmers using Ruby/Rails will also start making Ruby and Rails even more acceptable technologies in bigger companies. This in turn should help Rubyists find more jobs. JRuby is not only a great Ruby implementation it is also a gateway technology and we should concentrate on that side of JRuby this year.

2009-08-30T03:28:18Z

http://railsmagazine.com/forums/2/topics/72

7 Interview with Thomas Enebo

2009-12-24T20:52:54Z