Earlier this month we held the second UK Ruby Hack Challenge at Cookpad HQ in Bristol.

The goal of the Hack Challenge is to introduce C Ruby to open source developers and those interested in contributing, and who better to lead the proceedings than the creator of the Ruby language Matz, and core contributors Koichi, Endoh and Tenderlove!

Around 50 invited Rubyists made their way to Cookpad’s HQ in Bristol, UK from as far and wide as Japan, Russia, Poland, France, the Czech Republic, Canada and the US, for the one day deep dive into C Ruby, and how to get involved.

The day started with a fascinating talk from Matz where he went through each of the 41 reserved keywords in Ruby and explained where the idea or inspiration for them came from. It was a great reminder how language development evolves and that some of the constructs we know and take for granted were inspired many many decades ago from languages such as Eiffel and Sather to name but two!

Next, Koichi Sasada introduced the Hack Challenge starting with an overview of the MRI development culture and an introduction to the MRI source code structure and how to get it and build on your own machine, hacking the version number along the way to prove you have build and are running a local build.

Lastly we were introduced to some more involved example exercises to add a new method to Array for example. These guides are on GitHub and really straightforward to follow if you want to join in:

(1) Introduction of MRI development culture

(2) MRI source code structure

(3) Exercise: Add methods to Ruby

(4) Fixing bugs

(5) Performance improvements

After a delicious lunch, the hacking continued in earnest, with Matz and the Ruby Core experts on hand to help through any issues or bounce around ideas. The spirit of collaboration and common goal was really exciting to be part of.

At around 3pm we wrapped up the hacking and moved to presentation mode where teams or individuals got up and presented their work to Matz. This was amazing and daunting at the same time. I was so proud to see so many of the Cookpad UK team members getting up there, unfazed, and showing their work. Here are just a few photos with the respective PRs submitted during the event.

Warn in verbose mode on defining a finalizer that captures the object (Chris Seaton)

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/2264

https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/15974

Make the dot-colon method reference frozen (Maciej Mensfeld)

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/2267

Allow String#codepoints to take an argument to specify which base to convert each codepoint to (ollieh-m)

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/2270

Update Error message’s when passing nil args when initializing a Date (developingdanny)

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/2272

emoji pipe lol (Aaron Patterson)

https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/2273

Conclusion

The 2nd Ruby Hack Challenge at Cookpad in Bristol was an incredible event, we were honoured not only to have Yukihiro Matsumoto, Koichi Sasada, Yusuke Endoh and Aaron Patterson as our guides, but were joined by an incredible group of open source contributors, all interested to learn more about hacking on Ruby itself. Many thanks to Rafael França, Piotr Solnica, Anton Davydov, Maciej Mensfeld, Chris Seaton, Noah Gibbs, Kir Shatrov, Andrew White, Frederick Cheung, and everyone else who was able to join and make this such an incredible day.

We’ll be sharing more videos from the event over the coming weeks so please follow us here if you’re want to be notified, or we’re @cookpad_dev on twitter.

If you’re interested to learn more about Cookpad and how we use Ruby to make every day cooking fun for 100 million people every month, check out our story so far.