Aaron Patterson ("tenderlove")

Aaron Patterson, known everywhere as tenderlove, is one of the very few people on both the Ruby core team and the Rails core team, a bridge between the language and its most famous framework (he has also been one of the most prolific contributors to Rails). His fingerprints are all over daily Ruby: he wrote Nokogiri, the XML and HTML parser a huge share of programs quietly depend on, and Psych, the YAML library in Ruby’s standard library, and he built the compacting garbage collector (GC.compact) that lets Ruby tidy its own memory. He has worked at companies including GitHub and, more recently, Shopify. (tenderlovemaking.com, Compacting GC in MRI, RubyKaigi 2017)

He is also proof that serious engineering and pure silliness live comfortably together in Ruby. His yearly conference keynotes are beloved comedy events, dense with puns and running bits: a deep, sincere love of the terminal bell (he has talked about wanting a typewriter-style lever so that every carriage return goes ding), and his cats, Choo-Choo Bear and Gorbachev Puff Puff Thunderhorse III, whose photos he has been known to AirDrop to unsuspecting strangers. His blog is called Tenderlove Making, he signs his name with a heart (Aaron ❤️ Patterson), and he is the patron saint of cheerful puts debugging. The affection for him is about as close to universal as this community gets. (Uses This interview)

Related: "Wat" (Gary Bernhardt, 2012) · MINASWAN