James Nolan Weirich (November 18, 1956 – February 19, 2014) was a

software developer Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

, speaker, teacher, and contributor to the

Ruby programming language Ruby is a general-purpose programming language. It was designed with an emphasis on programming productivity and simplicity. In Ruby, everything is an object, including primitive data types. It was developed in the mid-1990s by Yukihiro "Mat ...

community. He was active in the Ruby community worldwide, speaking at events in Asia, South America, Europe, and the United States. Among his many contributions he created the popular

Rake Rake may refer to: Common meanings * Rake (tool), a horticultural implement, a long-handled tool with tines * Rake (stock character), a man habituated to immoral conduct * Rake (poker), the commission taken by the house when hosting a poker game ...

build tool for Ruby.

Work

Weirich was the Chief Scientist at Neo Innovation, working at Neo's Cincinnati office. He also built and maintained many

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

tools, the most popular being Rake and Builder with 74 and 54 million downloads, respectively.

is a build tool for automating tasks in Ruby. It is one of the most widely downloaded Ruby Gems, downloaded more than 481 million times and has been included with Apple OS X since at least version 10.7.
Builder
is a tool for creating structured

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

data through Ruby.

RubyGems RubyGems is a package manager for the Ruby programming language that provides a standard format for distributing Ruby programs and libraries (in a self-contained format called a "gem"), a tool designed to easily manage the installation of gem ...

is a package management tool for Ruby programs and libraries. Ryan Leavengood is credited with creating the very first RubyGems project in 2001, but it did not gain enough momentum to take off. In November 2003 with the need for a proper package manager growing, Richard Kilmer, Chad Fowler, David Black, Paul Brannan, and Jim Weirich got together at RubyConf 2003 in Austin and built today's RubyGems, which shares a name, but not the original codebase.
Ruby Koans
is a learning tool to teach people the Ruby Programming Language through a series of small exercises.
rspec-given
is an extension to the popular Ruby testing framework

RSpec RSpec is a computer domain-specific language (DSL) (particular application domain) testing tool written in the programming language Ruby to test Ruby code. It is a behavior-driven development (BDD) framework which is extensively used in product ...

that enables given/when/then notation when writing specs.
Git Immersion
is a guided tour that walks through the fundamentals of Git, inspired by the premise that to know a thing is to do it.
Argus
A Ruby API for controlling a Parrot AR Drone.

Presentations

Weirich was a popular conference speaker known for making very difficult topics understandable. An archive o
29 more recent talks
is available on the Confreaks site; some notable talks are linked below:
The Grand Unified Theory of Software
- Rails Underground 2009
SOLID Ruby
- RubyNation 2010
Power Rake
- Steel City Ruby 2012
Y Not? Adventures in Functional Programming
- Ruby Conference 2012
Kata and Analysis
- BostonRB Monthly Meeting - February 2013
Why Aren't You Using Ruby
- RubyConf Uruguay 2013
RubyMotion
- CincyCocoaDev April 2013
Decoupling from Rails
- CincyRB October 2013
Ruby, threads, events... and Flying Robots!
- CincyRB May 2013

Personal life

Weirich grew up in Shipshewana, Indiana, graduating from Westview Junior - Senior High School in 1975. He went on to graduate from

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a state university system, system of Public university, public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. The system has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration o ...

in 1979 with a degree in physics. He lived in Cincinnati, Ohio. Weirich was active in the Ruby community worldwide, and especially in Cincinnati, participating in the local

agile development Agile software development is an umbrella term for approaches to developing software that reflect the values and principles agreed upon by ''The Agile Alliance'', a group of 17 software practitioners, in 2001. As documented in their ''Manifesto ...

, Ruby, and functional programming user groups. At meetings, he often gave talks and was widely acclaimed for the clarity and quality of his presentations. News of Weirich's death was met with hundreds of tributes and thanks via comments o
his final GitHub commit
which includes a special banner added by

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

. The 1.9.3-p545 release of the Ruby programming language was dedicated to his memory.

References

External links

Weirich's personal blog
{{DEFAULTSORT:Weirich, Jim 1956 births 2014 deaths American computer programmers

Work

Presentations

Personal life

See also

References

External links