James Edward Gray II on Developer Community and Conference Conversations | UGtastic Archive
James Edward Gray, known for his work with Ruby, shares his journey into the language, the creation of the faster CSV library, and his involvement with the Ruby Rogues podcast.
The Interviewer
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
The Guest
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Hi, it's Mike again with UGtastic. I'm sitting down with James Edward Gray, who is known for Shades of Gray, the Ruby Rogues, and also if you've used his faster CSV library in 1. 8, and now it's part of the standard lib in Ruby 1. 9. Well, just Ruby 1. 9. But thanks for taking a moment to sit down, James. I appreciate it. Can you tell me a little bit about how you got involved with Ruby?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
Yeah, it was a long time ago. I think I entered the community in the summer of 2004 or something like that, and I'd just kind of gotten off of a job and went into that cycle of learning new things, and I grabbed a copy of the programming Ruby and decided I'd teach myself a new language and kind of got stuck and never left.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
What were you doing before Ruby?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
I'm Java certified. I did that for several years. I spent a lot of time in the Perl community working there. The project I came off of just before getting into the Ruby community was a big Perl site using CGI and all kinds of crazy stuff. So you've kind of really embraced the Ruby community and seems to have been a lot of fun for you.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
What was it about Ruby early on?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
Because 2004 was – I mean, it hadn't just come out, but that was pre-Rails. Yeah, it was really early. It was easy to get hooked in the community back then. It was a very small, tight-knit group of people. We had basically one mailing list where most of our communication happened, and you would literally be posting questions and getting answers from people like Dave Thomas and stuff like that. So I was just on the tail end of that era and got kind of sucked in that way.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
And then you created the faster CSV library.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
What drove that?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
It was an accident, actually. They were talking on the Ruby core mailing list about how the CSV library was so slow, and people were trying to analyze why it was slow. And really, it wasn't any particular fault of the library so much, just that it did a lot of work in a really tight loop, calling a bunch of methods and stuff, which in Ruby is pretty slow. And people were talking about ways to speed it up. And just a few weeks before that, I had read Mastering Regular Expression or something like that.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
And it had in the book one of the major examples was a regex that parsed CSV.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
And so I said, well, you can do it with one regular expression. And everybody's like, no, you can't. And so I went and pulled it out of the book and put it in the mailing list discussion. And a bunch of people threw really nasty examples at it that it didn't handle well. So I kept tweaking it and tweaking it to seeing if I could get it to do all of it. And I wrote this kind of tiny parser using primarily that one expression and a few other things to handle some gnarly edge cases. And that actually ended up being the faster CSV core for a long time. Eventually, somebody came along and rewrote the parser, not to use a regular expression. But that was the start of it.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
And then, I mean, what was the process that went from being an external Ruby gem to being part of the standard lib?
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
What did you have? Did you have to pay a fee? Did you have to sign a license agreement with Matt?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
Yeah, yeah. Sign away online. No, actually, there was discussion once faster CSV had been around for a while.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
There was discussion multiple times about, you know, should we replace the library and the standard core?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
And I think most people were positive to the idea in that, you know, we wanted a faster library and stuff. It was faster CSV had a slightly different interface than CSV. And, you know, we didn't want to break backwards compatibility. And I had a compatibility mode where it would behave like CSV, but it wasn't perfect. There were some cases where it couldn't do the right thing. So that was discussed for a long time, and nobody ever really came to a decision on that, which stalled it getting in. But then Greg Brown, a friend of mine, kind of got tired of it not being in there and wrote a pretty impassioned plea to, you know, this is ridiculous. We have a much better choice.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Can we just put it in?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
And then they were decided, at that point, it was discussed one more time, and it was decided, all right, compatibility be damned, we'll just switch over.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
Well, I remember upgrading from standard CSV to faster CSV and then migrating to 1. 9 and had no problems. I mean, but then again, maybe our case wasn't that exotic. 1. 9 was actually kind of a hurdle because when I brought it in, 1.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
9 had the M17N engine, right?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
So it had to be reworked extensively because of encodings, which encoding, you know, your data is in matters how you find things like a quote and a comma, right?
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
And so actually, CSV, the standard 1. 9 library, was probably the first practical application of M17N, and I basically had to figure out how all of that worked so that I could rewrite the core of CSV to be aware of encodings.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Oh, so that's how your encoding article came to be?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
That's exactly right.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
I had to figure all that out to port the library. Yeah, because actually that article was very helpful for me on more than one occasion, just trying to figure out why data was being lost between Rails, talking to Postgres, and back in an earlier version of the gem. We actually drove some bug fixes in Ruby at that time. When I was fixing CSV, I would figure out a lot of encoding stuff, and I would find some kind of bizarre edge cases and then post them to the list, and that actually ended up fixing certain bugs in Ruby. Oh, okay, so because you were actually driving a use case for a lot of these encoding issues, like putting in weird data, putting in foreign languages and a variety of languages. So that makes sense. Yeah, you were kind of up, burn-in testing the encoding engine.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
So the hardest thing when I was doing that is there was zero documentation. You know, the encoding was just a chunk of code that had been dumped into Ruby, and I had to basically sit there and reverse engineer it and talk to certain people about what it did, and that drove me crazy. So I wrote those articles that you mentioned on my blog. And so you're jumping over to some of the more social aspects, not just the code, but the Ruby Rogues. You're on there. You're a regular contributor to the Ruby Rogues podcast.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
How did you get involved with that?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
I'd had an idea from some other podcasts I listened to that had panel discussions, and I thought, man, it'd be really cool to do that in Ruby someday. And I guess Chuck had had pretty much the same idea, and I can't remember who mentioned it first, but one of us mentioned it on Twitter. Wouldn't it be cool to have a panel of, you know, Ruby discussions and the other, whichever one didn't mention it, the other one was like, I didn't think the same thing. And so we kind of started trading some emails over it and put together the original panel and just started doing it. And it was just something we did, you know, for fun in our spare time. But then it got popular pretty quick, really. And so we got lots of feedback, you know, your audio sucks and, you know, things like that.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
I hope eventually they get that kind of feedback. Right, yeah. Because I'll be like, yeah, they all suck. Yeah, when you get a bunch of listeners, they definitely bug you about it quick. So we started fixing that. And, you know, we had some people leave and some people come in, and then we just kind of got lucky in getting a team that really gelled eventually, you know, and played well off of each other. And I think that's mostly what led to its success. Yeah, I listened to quite a few. And Ruby 5 and Ruby Rogues are two that I can tolerate listening to in the background. Because sometimes it's almost like listening a little bit to, like, I used to listen to talk radio and the banter. It's not too heavy, but, you know, you can kind of tune it out, and it's like a conversation in the background.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
But it's fun. And that kind of is going to provide my segue into the next topic is I joked with Avdi when I interviewed him about what kind of was the impetus for me to reach out to him was listening to the episode. And it was just this kind of banter you guys were having in the beginning of the show about stand-up chairs, stand-up desks. And I was like, I didn't know at the time that you, you know, you were in a wheelchair. And somebody said something about a stand-up desk, and you said something like, oh, I don't use one, and I don't know who it said.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
But they're like, well, why, James?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
And, you know, and then you guys all laughed. And, you know, and I said to Avdi that that's, you know, that's a very positive banter because you can't just have that one unless you guys were all friends and knew each other well. But it is germane to the technical community and being out and speaking and going to user groups and conferences and things like that.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Has that been something that's – what has it been like? I hate that question, but what has it been like going to conferences in a wheelchair?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
It's not, you know, it's not too bad. There was some time early when I was first in the Ruby community. You know, it was a very small group, so I was probably the first one in a wheelchair in the community. And there – just at that time, there wasn't awareness. And there – so they would just book conferences in certain locations without thinking about things like accessibility. And there were a couple of early instances where some of the conferences were not in good accessible locations. And that wasn't anybody's fault. Like I said, it was just a lack of awareness. And when it was brought up, you know, everybody felt terrible and all of that. But being in the community pretty early on, that made everybody kind of start putting it as a bullet point on things you need to look for in a conference location, you know. And so that problem resolved itself really quickly, actually. And really, the harder part for me is just – it's not easy to travel with a big electric wheelchair, especially if you're going to take a plane. It's very inconvenient. So when I fly, I switch to a manual wheelchair, which is much easier to get around with when you're flying. But at the same time, it reduces my mobility a lot. And so because of that, I just don't tend to go to a lot of faraway conferences unless I make it a very special thing and do. So I tend to stick to the conferences around me. And I live basically right in the middle of the U. S. So I usually do the more central conferences. And so I don't get out to some of the big ones on the coast very often, though. Josh Susser keeps threatening to drag me to Goguruko. And I would like to make it there someday. But every now and then, I'll make a special exception. I went to Japan for Ruby Kaigi one time. But when going there, then I was traveling internationally.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
So you had things like, you know, how is the accessibility in Japan to consider?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
So I talked to Matt beforehand, and we had a discussion about it. And he told me it was really pretty good in Japan's modern cities. So to stay in the big, nice cities, but, you know, to avoid the little towns, which is pretty similar to here in the U. S. , actually. So I stayed in big places like Kyoto and Tokyo and did that. And then just recently, this last year, I attended Aloha Ruby Conf. So I flew down to Hawaii and did that. And it was a great time.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
So it is something that you communicate to organizers. Hey, if you're going to have me come speak, just heads up. Well, nowadays, I don't really have to do that anymore. You know, it seems to have just – it's something we think about now. And I've seen other people in wheelchairs at conferences now. So, you know, we're a big, sprawling, worldly community that needs to be aware of everybody's needs. So – and luckily, the good thing is, you know, once you reach a certain point, we're a huge community. You know, Ruby Conf limits the attendance and still gets 800 to 1,000, you know. So when you have to put that many people in a place, you typically need a very modern hotel or convention center. And those kinds of places are always accessible. Yeah, they've already got that handled.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Right.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
That's – yeah, because it is interesting that as I'm doing these interviews, I'm learning more about people's experiences in the community that aren't necessarily young white males. You know, but even the young white males like yourself, you know, there's all different varieties of ability and accessibility. So it's kind of been interesting for me. I actually didn't come from the . NET. I mean, I came from a . NET community for 10 years and then started into Ruby. But in the last few years, it seems like it has grown. There's been some serious pains with isms in the community. But it seems like we're coming out on the other side of that with a much more enlightened community or the birth pangs of an enlightened community. And it's kind of interesting that it's not been something that's been enforced from the outside or a government mandate or some kind of regulation. It's been largely grassroots the people in the community saying, hey, this is not acceptable or, hey, this has to be better. Yeah, I think that's really improving. I mean, like I said, I think now anybody who plans a Ruby conference is, you know, at least factors it into their thinking, you know, it should be accessible. You know, I have people tell me things like, we'd love to get you to come out to our conference sometimes. Oh, and I've checked, there's a ramp to get on stage or, you know, things like that, you know. So I think it's in people's minds now and they factor it into their thinking. And just attending the conferences, I'm noticing how much more diverse they're getting. And, yeah, that makes me really proud of us as a community. So, you know, a lot of people in the Ruby community seem to be also, it has hit a certain stage where a lot of the, it seems like a lot of the earlier people who adopted it are now starting to look at other technologies.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Is there anything for James? Are you looking at Clojure or anything like that?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
I play with lots of other things, you know, Erlang I've played with quite a bit. I haven't got around to Clojure or Scala yet, but they're on my list, you know, to get to eventually. Actually, in recent years, I've been more trying to focus on complementary things. Like, you know, a lot of people will go learn Clojure and, you know, use that a bunch. But I've been trying to do things like, I actually sat down at one point and finally sat down and learned Bash, you know, the shell. I just, you know, all those years I could use it a little bit, never really sat down and read through a book on it and learned how to write loops in it or things like that. And, boy, that was phenomenal for my productivity. Like, I can't tell you how valuable it was, actually.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
I mean, I understand now when a process works, what's going on, you know, and what are the rules?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
And it's funny how much that helps. And so I've been learning more complementary things. I'm a big, regular expression nut, and I enjoy digging down into the guts of Oniguruma and building really complicated regular expressions to understand how the engine works and things. So I've been focusing more on complementary stuff and less on totally, you know, I'm going to switch to this other language kind of stuff.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
So are you going to come up with a Bash quiz book or?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
No, I don't think my Bash is that good. You need to talk to somebody like Wayne Seguin for that.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
He's really great at that kind of stuff.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Yeah.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
So just to kind of bring us to the tail end, you've written a few books. And the one that was kind of the most interesting for me was the Ruby quiz. I've only paged through it. I've not actually read it formally. I've sat down and looked through it. But it was interesting that it was more of like, here's some kind of neat things that maybe you wouldn't expect.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
And what was the impetus for creating that book?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
So when I came to the Ruby community, I came from the Pearl community. And about the only thing I missed from Pearl was Pearl had Pearl's Quiz of the Week back then run by Mark Jason Dominus. And it was a little different from the Ruby quiz. It had like a beginner's level and then expert level each week and stuff. But I really missed doing that quiz and seeing all the solutions and stuff like that. So I created the Ruby quiz to fill that void because I missed it. And I ran it for quite a while. I can't remember how long. And Dave Thomas at that time was, you know, really getting that pragmatic bookshelf going. And that was when they started producing a lot of Ruby books. And he came to me and said, would you like to take some of the best of the Ruby quizzes and turn them into a book?
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay.
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
So that was how it happened. And he admitted at the time, he's all, you know, it probably won't be a great seller, you know, because it's kind of a niche thing and stuff. But he said that, you know, it's a neat topic and will be something fun to have in the lineup. Yeah, it was always on the shelves at any of the consultancies I was at. But it's 1. 8. Is there an update coming for 1.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
9?
James Edward Gray II
developer community and conference conversations
▶ Speaking
No, they recently took that book out of print. So I think it's all done. I did the Ruby quiz for three years and then kind of set it aside. It was a huge time commitment because, you know, you had to have problems ready to go. And I wrote the problem each week. And then also I had to, as Promise came in, I had to dig through the code enough that I could figure it out and talk about it, you know. So that took me some time. And then I wrote up the summary each week. So all in all, it took me about eight hours a week, I would say, to just run it and sometimes more. Oh, wow. It was a complicated problem or something. So eventually I was like, oh, this is a lot of fun, but I'm going to have to set this aside if I'm going to be able to do other things. And there have been some people who've ran brief stints in the interim, but nothing like the original run.
Mike Hall
Interviewer, UGtastic
▶ Speaking
Okay. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to sit down and chat with me. So thank you very much. You have a good day. Absolutely. Thanks.
Critical Insights
durable
"Ruby's early community was small and tight-knit, making it easy to get involved."
durable
"The creation of the faster CSV library was an accident, driven by a desire to improve performance."
durable
"The process of moving the faster CSV library into the standard library was challenging, with discussions about compatibility and the need for a better choice."
durable
"James Edward Gray's work on the faster CSV library and encoding articles helped drive bug fixes in Ruby."
durable
"The Ruby Rogues podcast was created as a fun side project, but it gained popularity and required effort to improve audio quality and team dynamics."