At Cookpad we love, use and support Ruby every day, and we want to help ensure its continuous improvement, so we organised the Ruby Hack Challenge earlier this month at our Global HQ in Bristol, UK.

We invited an incredible international group of developers — many major open source contributors in their own right — and the goal was to introduce Ruby C development to some of the people who know and love Ruby and use it every day like us, and give them access and insight on how to get involved if they want to.

We asked Matz, Koichi, Mame and Tenderlove what they hoped to achieve by hosting the event and this is what they said: (full video at the end of this post)

Matz:

“This event is important because we need new people.”

“As an open source community, if we become stable, we gradually die.”

“Especially people outside of Japan, the opportunity to communicate and encourage the potential of core committers, core developers, is pretty crucial for our community as a whole.”

Koichi:

“Joining the Ruby interpreter development is difficult without any help”

“so we support such beginnings of interpreter development, if they can become Ruby contributors, it will be a very great success!”

Mame:

“I just expect some of the attendees to become Ruby committers in the future.”

“Recently some new committers, Samuel Williams and Jeremy Evans became very active to develop Ruby.”

“To keep ruby active we need to increase committers so I hope this event helps and motivates people”

Tenderlove:

“For me personally, what I would hope that the Ruby Hack Challenge, what it would accomplish is that I get to meet really great Rubyists from here in England.”

“I really hope that we get some good ideas from other developers in the community and incorporate it back into the Ruby language itself.”

Watch the full video here:

If you want to get involved in C Ruby development yourself, take a look at Koichi’s Ruby Hack Challenge guides and dive in!

We’re building our team at Cookpad in the UK, so if you love Ruby as much as we do and want to learn more about our mission in Bristol, get in touch: we’re @cookpad_dev on Twitter or check out our open positions here!