Ruby Hero Recognition And Community: Mike Hall Interviews Rafael França | RailsConf 2014

Three years ago, I was in my hometown. It's a small town back in Brazil. I saw that José Valim, one of my co-workers, was nominated as RailsConf member. So I tried to do the same thing he did, and I was looking for every single committee on the Rails repository and trying to understand how the project works. And after some weeks, I got to know that there is a lot of work in RailsConf. So I submitted my first pull request. It was about helping what Aaron was doing to make Rails work with mini-tests. And after that, I just was jumping on every single issue that people were opening on the repository and trying to fix the problems, also improving what I think they're doing. And that is how... So you're just looking, you just were eager and whatever needs to be done.

And what you did it. Yeah, actually, exactly this. And when I first started, I had... Actually, I still don't know how to speak English very well. You're doing great. So when I started, I did not know anything about English. I was... Trying to learn how to communicate with people speaking English. And that was amazing because I could read and write very well. And I could communicate and help people with my knowledge.

And, you know, you cover a lot of ground. You cover a lot of different issues across the code base. I mean, we looked at your graph for commits and it was a broad span of contributions across the Kickstarter code base. How do you... Do you keep that all in your head or do you work inside of a certain area mostly for a little while and then you move to another area? Because I mean, how do you... Because that's a lot of ground to cover. When I started there, I was only working with the forms helpers. That was easy to me to work in that I already know how it works. So that was how I started. But after that, I was trying to help people to fix the problem. So I was just waiting in the code base, let's say, for ActiveHackery to try to understand the problem and fix it or I don't know, improve the code base. And maybe this was easy for me because I was following the Rails commits for so long, for a long time before it started to contribute. So I already know where I need to find the place that needs to be fixed or changed. And has been digging into the code base and doing these fixes made it easier to do your paid work or with Rails? Absolutely. So because you know what's going on in there.

It's a great thing to do because every single talk that I give in the conference, I always finish saying people to try to understand the software they are using because that will make the job very, very easy.

If you understand how your tools work, you're going to be that much more effective using the tools. And going in and contributing sounds like it's a great way to give back as well as improve your own skills.

So it's a very effective way to learn how to use the tools.