Steve Klabnik

Steve Klabnik is a writer and programmer who was a prolific contributor to Ruby on Rails before becoming one of the central voices of the Rust programming language. In the Ruby world he is remembered for something quieter and more tender than any single library: he is the person who caught and preserved the final work of _why the lucky stiff, the anonymous artist whose playful projects shaped how Ruby talks to newcomers. When _why left the internet in 2009 and deleted nearly everything he had made, Steve was among the volunteers who mirrored and kept his projects alive, and his best-known piece of that work is the book CLOSURE (below). Much of _why’s scattered output now lives in an online collection called the _why estate, maintained by Paige Ruten at viewsourcecode.org/why, where the compiled CLOSURE sits among it.

The most striking piece of that rescue is a book called CLOSURE. In April 2013 _why released a final work by placing it one page at a time onto a public print queue, a jumble of raw printer files with no instructions. Steve collected the files, put the pages back into the order they had been released, and compiled them into a single PDF he titled CLOSURE, because, as the name suggests, it gives the story some resolution.

Steve’s second act is in Rust, a systems programming language. He joined the Rust core team in December 2014 (announced alongside Yehuda Katz), led its documentation team, and co-wrote The Rust Programming Language with Carol Nichols, the language’s official introductory book. After roughly a decade on Rust he moved on to writing Rust professionally rather than shepherding the language itself. It is a fitting arc for someone who first showed up in these communities as a careful keeper of other people’s words.

Related: _why the lucky stiff · Yehuda Katz · Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto