Yehuda Katz

Yehuda Katz (known online as wycats) is a Rails Core Team alum who co-created Bundler, the tool that installs and manages the outside libraries (called “gems”) a Ruby project depends on, so that everyone building the same app gets the exact same versions. He built Bundler with Carl Lerche during the pair’s prolific “Carlhuda” period, and the two of them, joined by André Arko, shipped Bundler 1.0 in 2010, right as it was becoming the standard way every Rails app manages its dependencies. André went on to become its lead maintainer. See Bundler for the fuller story.

That same era was the big Rails 3 rewrite, and Yehuda was in the thick of it. He had been on the Merb core team (Merb was a rival Ruby framework), and when Merb and Rails merged to become Rails 3, he became one of the people reshaping the framework David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) had created. Rails Contributors ranks him among its all-time top contributors.

He is also, unusually, a bridge to other language communities. He is one of the creators of Ember.js, a JavaScript framework for building web apps, and of Handlebars, a popular templating tool. He co-created Cargo, the package manager for the Rust programming language (the same job Bundler does for Ruby), and describes himself as a retired member of the Ruby on Rails, jQuery, and Rust core teams, plus an occasional member of TC39, the committee that designs new versions of JavaScript.

Related: Bundler · David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) · The Merb and Rails merger