 So we do this little thing every year and we've been doing it for a little while Indulge me for a little bit while we do this. It's called Ruby Heroes and the purpose of it is to recognize some of the lesser-known people or the people that have done such great Important work in the Ruby community that we feel like we need to do something a little special for them We run this on a website called RubyHeroes.com every year So at the beginning of the year or sometimes a little late, sadly We tell people to go to that website and we say hey, so this year Who has impacted your life as a Rubyist as a Rails developer who has made it easier who has Produced stuff that helped you do your work or has been extremely kind to you or has made the community as a whole better so as I said we started doing this in 2008, so it's been nine years now and We've had a lot of really great people over the years people that are more well known people that are less well known over the years so you might recognize some familiar faces that have gone on to do great things and This year we've had 454 nominations from the community at large. We've had 133 nominees from these nominations so people that were Thanks by other people and we have a committee of 20 past heroes among the previous heroes that went through and basically tried to try to do a step which Removes this aspect of popularity contest So it's not just about how cool and popular people are we try to find people who are doing great work And there are not necessarily well known and they've selected nine new heroes for this year This is actually a record We've we've had eight one year, but never that many so we're gonna try to keep it fast But before we do that, I'd like to thank a few people who helped us put this together Because they're amazing So first there's Ruby central which you know of course, but they've helped us a ton getting this This event together and helping the people that we're gonna think come here, which is sometimes a very difficult You'll you'll see Also, there's code school Morgan and I work for code school And they allow us to take the time to prepare this to work on the app every year to organize this event and come to you To present it and lastly, there's you and I want to kind of like take a moment to talk about you guys the the importance here is When someone does something nice It's very important for you to remember to say something about it to go talk to them Especially when you're in a group like this where you can actually go see them I know sometimes it can be scary, but if you do it or if you do it through Ruby heroes these people feel bolstered sometimes when Stuff gets hard so it helps them All right, so let's get to it So instructions really quick. I'm not sure everybody's here We've tried really really hard to bring everybody here and if they're not then we'll just you know give them a round of applause otherwise they'll come up on stage and See more get over there who's gonna help them out and then we'll all look at them for a little bit awkwardly as they just stand there That's easy. So not a lot of not a lot of time a lot of heroes as I said watch your feet I mentioned that there's stairs over there. That's not for you guys You can watch your feet if you want, but that's more for the people like Trying to fumble over here So I'm gonna give you a little quote that someone said Specifically while the nominations were going on about each person so that you get a sense of their impact if you're not familiar with them first up Because of our tireless efforts in making the open-source community a better place by creating of the contributor covenants and trying Incredibly hard to get people even in the most hostile environments to adopt it Please welcome Coraline Ada and kick He's a longtime a Ruby and Rails Committer Organizes Ruby Kai one of the great international Ruby conferences in Tokyo And he's the author of many many widely used gems like Caminari active decorator trace route database rewinder and more Please welcome Akira Matsuda Matsuda Akira in the last four years They have raised almost half a million dollars and recruited hundreds of coaches and Mentors to get dozens of women into programming and contributing to open source. We can attest that it changes people's lives Please welcome on stage the rails girl sum of code team Annika lintner Laura Gaetano and Sarah Reagan He has put many years and tremendous effort into continuously and incrementally improving the sea ruby implementation He wrote YARV pushed for flow nums implanted implemented partial generation garbage collection, which is a mouthful and Many many other improvements all of these things have been the primary drivers of increased performance and better garbage collection in ruby His impact is large, but his presence is not at least in much of the world outside Japan. Please welcome Koichi Sasada His articles are always informative and enjoyable furthermore they focus on big language issues performance memory Delicious food and they mention problems and solutions. He represents. What is good about the ruby community? Please what welcome on stage Richard Schneemann Who likes to sit on the other side with ruby tapas? He continues his long tradition of leveling up ruby developers everywhere his in his appearance on the ruby rogues podcast He always asks interesting questions and provides tidbit provides tidbits of wisdom and on ruby and the state of our community With books like confident ruby and exceptional ruby He has given guidance to many new ruby developers on writing clean and readable ruby code He has inspired me not me, but the person who said that To not only be a better ruby developer, but also a better software developer overall That's why he's my ruby hero. Please welcome avd grim and finally He has been leading the j ruby project for most of its existence Which has been responsible for many enterprises actually using ruby He's constantly working on making j ruby better and faster and regularly going to conferences all over the world Showing you how you can use ruby and still have high performance. Please welcome Charles Nutter So now that they are all Awkwardly looking at you and waiting impatiently to get off on stage. Can you please give them a really really big round of applause please? Thank you all very much. That's it for us and remember this is important Keep being nice to the people who make your life a little better every day. Thank you very much