I'm super excited by this -- I have been reluctant to use SproutCore, but I have a strong feeling that Yehuda's contributions will change that. I love JQuery, but what I really want is something that can do a bit more, like SproutCore or Cappuccino. Yehuda, when can we expect your contributions to become a public part of SproutCore?
Yehuda has already made some fantastic changes to the Abbot build tools that should be landing with the 1.4 release any day. It's in rc2 right now, just run gem install sproutcore --pre, the tools are super fast now.
Thanks for all you've done, working with Rails has been (if possible) even easier and more fun because of you. Can't wait to see what new possibilities open up to someone with nothing more than an idea and a laptop.
I feel a bit sad for Rails (yes, I know he will continue contributing, but I doubt it will be anything close to what he did in the last few years, when that was his main job).
But he seems a great guy and he deserves all the best. Good luck in your next endeavour.
Of the two public people who left Engine Yard, Ezra and Yehuda, they have different qualities. Both notable and oft overlooked in our tech-bent community.
Ezra writes technology and Yehuda informs technology.
I see Ezra doing things beyond me. I see Yehuda bridging the gap between myself and Ezra.
It doesn't matter where they are. Watch each with their strengths and you will see fantastic things.
And not just physical output of code, but he also seems extremely friendly & helpful and interested in fostering productive communities. Which is IMO just as important to the long-term health of open-source projects.
Quoting from his website "Yehuda Katz is a member of the Ruby on Rails core team, and lead developer of the Merb project. He is a member of the jQuery Core Team, and a core contributor to DataMapper. He contributes to many open source projects, like Rubinius and Johnson, and works on some he created himself, like Thor."
But what that doesn't say is his contributions through his blog (both personal and EngineYard blog). I have learned more Rails 3 from his articles than anywhere else.
He co-authored a book called 'jQuery in Action'. Another excellent read.
To answer your question directly, Yehuda adds a lot of value to whatever he takes up. Apart from writing excellent code he explains it succinctly through his writing. SproutCore will benefit from this.
Props for the link to a great presentation of Avi Bryant (http://twitter.com/avibryant, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=avibryant, who is not only brilliant for his work on his startup that got bought by twitter, his seaside framework, which brought continuations to web, copied later by Scala Thrift framework, and also helped pg get on twitter).
his seaside framework, which brought continuations to web
Is this the case? I looked (briefly) for confirmation and did find at the very least papers discussing the use of Scheme's continuations for web session management, circa Seaside's first public announcement in 2002...
Well, seaside is also from 2002 (from their website: http://seaside.st/). But, If I am not mistaken, JBoss Seam, which is (unfortunately) far more mainstream than seaside/scheme/smalltalk, got its continuations idea from Seaside. And scalas' LIFT framework, which is also more mainstream, also got its inspiration from Seaside.
Because Yehuda will be working on SproutCore, I took another good look at it last night, playing with the Ruby (Sinatra) and the Clojure back end tutorial examples.
I met Yehuda at a Merb camp and listening to his talks about efficiency altered my view of using Ruby.
The culture of worshiping people for being OK at their jobs is more than a little sickening. While not elucidating, the penis pic does make a valid point.
