First Ruby Internal Hackathon @ Cookpad

Last week, Cookpad hosted another in-house hackathon, in the Ebisu (Tokyo) office.

Koichi Sasada is a full-time Ruby committer, author of YARV, the new official Ruby VM. He recently joined Cookpad’s engineering team and is expected to continue his work on the Ruby language here.

Sasada-san taught us about Ruby in the morning

The hackathon

Sasada-san supervised this hackathon, with the Ruby interpreter for main theme. The goal was to involve Cookpad’s Ruby developers and, for many, to be a first introduction to improving Ruby itself. He was even able to invite Nobuyoshi Nakada, another full-time Ruby committer, to help.

The first half of the hackathon was dedicated to introducing us to the processes and tools to contribute to Ruby.

During the second half, people broke up into small groups, and focused either on issues, or areas of improvement they thought of themselves.

Results

About 50 developers showed up in Cookpad’s lounge, for an intense programming day, and a lot of results showed up at the end of the day! About 30 challenges were tackled on the day of the event, and more than 20 are already complete, while most of the others are still going strong!

Personal experience

I have a really light background in C programming, and have never contributed to the Ruby interpreter (except for an issue I opened a long time ago, which was actually not a bug!). I was eager to join another hackathon, as I really like the concept, and excited to learn about Ruby’s internals, and yet very anxious I would not be able to offer any useful help.

It ended up being a great experience. I learned a lot about how the Ruby interpreter works, and how it is built, and for that only I’m very thankful!

I also had the opportunity to try and change the code myself, and experience its complexity. As I expected, I was not able to provide any interesting code improvement, but I managed to filter a couple issues by assessing them and showing they were not actual Ruby bugs. Any help is good, right?

I also felt very humbled, being surrounded by so many great developers, ready to get their hands dirty improving Ruby’s internals, and actually contributing improvements, fixes!

It looks like some developers got hooked, and are eager to contribute more to Ruby, still working on challenges they started that day. I would say that makes the whole event a success!