Simply put, Aaron Patterson is a tender loving code ninja and maestro of Ruby who our developers were lucky enough to spend the day with at the Spokeo offices in Pasadena last Friday. Having originally started out coding to impress women, Aaron’s greatest love affair to date began when he learned Ruby as a mod_perl turned java developer at Classmates.com in 2001 where he met Spokeo’s own Walter Turner. Since then, Aaron has become one of Ruby’s top contributors and most well respected subject matter experts. With 4464 current commits, Aaron is the #1 Ruby contributor of all time.
On Friday Aaron shared valuable thoughts on the direction and future of Ruby and the future of Rails, his approach to profiling performance in a Rails application, and his approach to optimizing performance on unit tests. Spokeo developers gained insight on MRI vs JRuby vs Rubinius and learned best practices for integrating single-page javascript applications with rails. Aaron was also able to lend his invaluable direction on performance optimization and gotchas, and his thoughts on maximizing performance in light of our recent moving towards NoSQL and away from ActiveRecord.
What a treat to have him here!
Visits from industry leaders are just one of the many perks Spokeo offers its employees. Be sure to also check out our mention in today’s LA Times cover story about LA tech companies and they great perks they offer.