The "Patch Monster": report a Ruby bug and a fix seems to appear before you finish your coffee.
Nobuyoshi Nakada, known everywhere as nobu, is a core committer for CRuby (the main Ruby implementation, the one most people actually run) and is widely regarded as among the most prolific contributors in Ruby’s history. Ruby’s own official documentation introduces him with his nickname, “a.k.a. the ‘patch monster,’” and lists him as the author and maintainer of building blocks many programs quietly rely on, including optparse (for reading command-line options), stringio, and io/wait. The nickname is community affection for a real pattern: fixes and patches seem to appear from him almost the moment a problem is reported. The scale is easy to see on Ruby’s bug tracker, where his account has been assigned well over 900 issues, the great majority already closed.
He has worked as a full-time core committer, meaning maintaining Ruby itself is his actual job rather than a nights-and-weekends hobby, which is part of how the patches keep coming. He is also a longtime conference speaker; he gave a RubyKaigi keynote in 2017 titled “Making Ruby?”, a tour through the unglamorous, careful work of keeping the language healthy. If Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto is the visionary who decides what Ruby should feel like, nobu is a large part of the reason it keeps working, release after release.
Related: Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto · MRI / CRuby / YARV
Sources
Sources
- Ruby contributors (official docs, ruby-lang.org, for “patch monster” and his maintained libraries): https://docs.ruby-lang.org/en/2.7.0/contributors_rdoc.html
- nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada), Ruby Issue Tracking System (for his committer role and 900+ assigned issues): https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/users/4
- Making Ruby? (Nobuyoshi Nakada keynote slides, RubyKaigi 2017): https://slide.rabbit-shocker.org/authors/nobu/rubykaigi-2017/