Contact Us
Contact Us

Top 17 Ruby Developers You Should Know

ruby developers - Top 17 Ruby Developers You Should Know

Ruby’s vibrant community is driven by a diverse mix of language creators, open-source contributors, startup founders, educators, and more.

Below is a curated list of outstanding Ruby developers. Each has made significant contributions, whether by shaping the core language, building essential libraries and tools, leading companies that rely on Ruby, or inspiring others through education and content.

  1. Yukihiro Matsumoto
  2. Jemma Issroff
  3. Aaron Patterson
  4. David Heinemeier Hansson
  5. Koichi Sasada
  6. Tobias Lütke
  7. Jeremy Evans
  8. Konstantin Haase
  9. Dmytro Zaporozhets
  10. Eileen Uchitelle
  11. Nobuyoshi Nakada
  12. Bozhidar Batsov
  13. Sandi Metz
  14. Mike Perham
  15. Avdi Grimm
  16. Hiroshi Shibata
  17. Sam Saffron

Now, let’s delve into each of these individuals and their contributions:

Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto

YouTube Video

Nationality: Japanese

Matz is the creator and chief designer of the Ruby programming language.

He released Ruby in 1995 and has guided its development ever since, emphasizing programmer happiness and productivity. Under his leadership, Ruby evolved with major releases (2.x, 3.x) while retaining its humane design philosophy. Matz remains actively involved in Ruby’s future, often keynoting at Ruby conferences and setting the vision (e.g. “Ruby 3×3” performance goal and gradual typing initiative). He continues to serve as Chief Ruby Architect at Heroku and as a fellow at the Ruby Association, mentoring the core team and community.

Jemma Issroff

Nationality: American

Jemma is a rising star in the Ruby core team, known for her work on Ruby’s Garbage Collector and for fostering community inclusivity.

A performance enthusiast, she co-authored the book “Ruby Garbage Collection in Under Two Hours” and has written many deep-dives on how objects are allocated and collected in Ruby. Jemma joined Shopify’s Ruby Infrastructure team and quickly made impactful contributions to MRI (she’s credited on improvements to GC compaction and memory management). In 2022, she was invited to become a Ruby committer – a rare honor, especially for someone relatively early in their career. Beyond coding, Jemma co-founded WNB.rb, a global group for women and non-binary Rubyists, creating a more welcoming space in the community.

She also helped organize the RubyConf Mini conference and frequently appears on podcasts and talks, enthusiastically explaining low-level Ruby topics (like how the parser or Just-In-Time compiler work). Jemma’s energy for teaching is evident in her weekly “Ruby Tip of the Week” newsletter (which she wrote for Ruby Weekly). In a short time, she’s become both a core contributor and a role model for inclusivity. Her passion for Ruby is infectious, and she’s ensuring that Ruby’s future (and community) are in good hands.

Aaron “Tenderlove” Patterson

Aaron Tenderlove Patterson - Top 17 Ruby Developers You Should Know

Nationality: American

Aaron is a superstar open-source contributor – notably, he’s the only person on the core teams of both Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

He has authored key Ruby libraries like Nokogiri (XML/HTML parser) and Psych (YAML parser) and improved Ruby’s garbage collector and performance. In Rails, he’s contributed countless patches, especially in ActiveRecord and caching, and is the all-time top contributor to Rails. Aaron’s work has made Ruby apps faster and more secure (he’s on Ruby and Rails security teams too). Currently a Senior Staff Engineer at Shopify, he continues to move both the language and framework forward. His coding prowess is matched by a playful personality – known for humorous conference talks and cat jokes – which makes him an especially beloved figure in the Ruby world.

David Heinemeier Hansson

Nationality: Danish

DHH is the creator of Ruby on Rails, the hugely influential web framework that brought Ruby to the mainstream in 2004.

His work on Rails – extracted from the Basecamp project – earned him Google’s “Hacker of the Year” in 2005. Rails’ convention-over-configuration approach and elegant Ruby DSL attracted thousands of developers and startups (GitHub, Airbnb, etc. all began on Rails), fundamentally boosting Ruby’s popularity. David is also a co-founder and CTO of 37signals (Basecamp/HEY), where he proves Rails can scale to large applications. He remains a vocal advocate for simplicity in software and for Ruby’s values. His public writings (blog posts, books like Rework) often defend Ruby/Rails against trends, stressing developer happiness and productivity over “hard tech for its own sake.”

DHH’s outsized influence on web development and the Ruby community makes him one of the most famous Rubyists in the world.

Koichi Sasada

Nationality: Japanese

Koichi is a Ruby core committer and the mastermind behind Ruby’s modern virtual machine.

He created YARV (“Yet Another Ruby VM”), which became the Ruby 1.9+ interpreter and significantly improved Ruby’s execution speed. Over decades on the core team, Koichi has led efforts in improving MRI’s performance and garbage collection (e.g. introducing a generational/incremental GC in Ruby 2.1). He also spearheaded Ruby 3’s guild/Ractor concurrency model to bring true parallelism to Ruby programs. A former professor turned full-time Ruby developer, Koichi joined Cookpad in 2017 to focus on Ruby development, and as of 2023 works on MRI at a Japanese tech firm (STORES.jp). His deep academic knowledge (PhD in Information Science) and hands-on contributions make him the go-to expert on Ruby internals.

Simply put, Koichi’s work on the VM (and now experimental JIT and concurrency) keeps Ruby fast and evolving.

Tobias “Tobi” Lütke

Tobias Tobi Lutke - Top 17 Ruby Developers You Should Know

Nationality: German

Tobi is the co-founder and CEO of Shopify, one of the biggest success stories built on Ruby on Rails.

In 2004, he began writing software (using then-new Rails) for an online snowboard shop, which evolved into the Shopify platform in 2006. Under Tobi’s technical leadership, Shopify grew into a global e-commerce company running a massive Rails monolith at scale. Uniquely, Tobi remained hands-on in coding for many years and was even an early member of the Rails core team, contributing code and feedback. He also created Liquid, the theming language used in Shopify storefronts, and ActiveMerchant, a widely used Ruby library for payment processing. Tobi’s advocacy for Ruby is strong – he has hired several Ruby core team members at Shopify and invested in Ruby’s future (YJIT, etc.).

As a tech CEO who still gets his hands dirty with code, he’s an inspiration in the Ruby startup scene, proving that you can start with Rails and scale to an IPO.

Jeremy Evans

Nationality: American

Jeremy is a highly productive Ruby hacker known for creating the Sequel database toolkit and the Roda web framework.

As lead developer of Sequel (an alternative ORM to ActiveRecord), he has for years provided the community with a simpler, thread-safe, and flexible way to talk to databases in Ruby. He also built Roda, a super-fast routing framework, and Rodauth, a robust authentication framework – all emphasizing minimalism and performance. Beyond his own projects, Jeremy is a Ruby core committer who focuses on fixing bugs and polishing MRI (he has a reputation for submitting high-quality patches to Ruby). In fact, he received the Ruby Prize in 2020 for his work on keyword argument separation in Ruby 3. Jeremy is an exemplar of community-driven development: he’s active on forums helping others, writes detailed release notes for Sequel/Roda, and even authored a book (Polished Ruby Programming).

He’s also the maintainer of Ruby ports for OpenBSD, ensuring Ruby runs smoothly on that OS. With a career spanning many libraries, Jeremy’s ethos is all about clean design and reliability. Many companies quietly run on his software. By contributing both to Ruby’s core and its ecosystem, Jeremy Evans has earned deep respect as a “developer’s developer” in the Ruby world.

Konstantin Haase

Nationality: German

Konstantin is an open-source prodigy known for his work on web frameworks and tooling.

As a teenager, he became the lead maintainer of Sinatra, the minimalist Ruby web DSL, and co-authored the O’Reilly book Sinatra: Up and Running. Under his guidance, Sinatra grew into a staple for small web services, used at companies like Heroku and Apple. Konstantin also co-founded Travis CI, the hosted continuous integration service that was very popular in the Rails community (and beyond) for running tests – he served as CTO there. Additionally, he’s contributed to Rails, Rack, Rubinius and many Ruby gems (he’s known as “rkh” online). His code is characterized by brevity and cleverness (famous for a demo where he refactored Sinatra to 6 lines). Konstantin won a Ruby Hero Award early on and has been active in Ruby’s evolution (e.g. contributing to routing in Rails).

Currently, he’s the founder/CTO of another startup (Valid), but still an “open-source enthusiast” at heart. Konstantin’s impact: he provided the community with Sinatra’s simplicity as an alternative to Rails, and improved developer workflow via Travis CI. Not many in their 20s can claim that level of influence on Ruby’s ecosystem.

Dmytro Zaporozhets

Dmytro Zaporozhets - Top 17 Ruby Developers You Should Know

Nationality: Ukrainian

Dmytro is the co-founder of GitLab, a major DevOps platform written in Ruby.

In 2011, while in Ukraine, he created GitLab as an open-source alternative to GitHub, initially as a Rails application he hacked on at night. By 2014 it grew into a company, with Dmytro as CTO scaling both the code and the engineering team. GitLab’s codebase (one of the largest open-source Rails apps) benefited greatly from his contributions and leadership. He guided the project from a two-person endeavor to a billion-dollar company with worldwide contributors. Notably, Dmytro stayed based in Kharkiv and kept coding in Ruby throughout GitLab’s rise, becoming a hometown tech hero in Eastern Europe. His story showcases how far a passionate Ruby developer can go – from side-project to unicorn.

Dmytro’s impact spans coding (he built the initial feature set of GitLab) and community (proving that open source + Ruby can create something huge).

Eileen Uchitelle

Nationality: American

Eileen is a powerhouse engineer who has improved both Ruby and Rails, especially in the context of large-scale apps.

She first made her mark at GitHub, where she led the effort to upgrade their massive Rails monolith from version 3.2 to 5.2, and implemented features like cross-database associations in Rails 7 to support GitHub’s multi-db architecture. Eileen became a member of the Rails Core team in 2017 and has contributed heavily to Rails’ framework code (particularly in Active Record and railties). Recently, in 2023, she was invited onto the Ruby Core team as well, recognizing her contributions to MRI (such as improvements to garbage collection and performance tuning for real-world apps).

Now at Shopify as a Senior Staff Engineer, Eileen works on Ruby & Rails infrastructure at scale, sharing lessons from running some of the world’s largest Rails apps. She’s also an advocate for open source mentorship and making both Rails and Ruby more welcoming. Whether it’s keynotes about the internals of Rails or pull requests to make Ruby faster, Eileen bridges the gap between the framework and language. Her passion and skill have earned her a spot as one of the few who sit on both Rails and Ruby core teams simultaneously.

Nobuyoshi “Nobu” Nakada

Nationality: Japanese

Nobu is often called the “secret weapon” of Ruby’s core team – he’s the most prolific contributor to CRuby (MRI) in history.

Since the early days of Ruby, he has made over 10,000 commits to the language, fixing bugs, implementing features, and refactoring code. Many Ruby developers might not know his name because he works humbly in the background, but virtually every Ruby release has Nobu’s fingerprints on it. From critical bug fixes to improvements in the standard library, his contributions are too numerous to list. Nobu has been a tireless full-time Ruby maintainer, ensuring each new version is stable and polished. A 2014 RubyConf talk aptly titled “Nobody Knows Nobu” highlighted that he leads the all-time commit charts and is the person who “makes Ruby happen” day-to-day.

While not active on social media or as a conference speaker, in the Ruby developer community Nobu is revered as a quiet legend who has kept Ruby on track for over two decades.

Bozhidar Batsov

Bozhidar Batsov - Top 17 Ruby Developers You Should Know

Nationality: Bulgarian

Bozhidar is an influential open-source contributor who has shaped Ruby coding practices.

He’s the creator of RuboCop, the widely used static code analyzer and linter for Ruby, which enforces a consistent style across projects. RuboCop (started in 2012) grew out of Bozhidar’s work on the community-driven Ruby Style Guide (which he initiated in 2011). Thanks to these efforts, Rubyists everywhere have a common set of best practices and an automated tool to check them – a lasting impact on code quality. Beyond RuboCop, Bozhidar has contributed to many Ruby and Rails libraries and even co-authored a book on Rails style. He’s also known in the Clojure world (maintaining the CIDER project), but his Ruby contributions are most prominent. Hailing from Bulgaria, Bozhidar often speaks about clean code and has helped mentor new OSS contributors.

His work embodies the saying “reading good code is as important as writing it,” giving the community guidelines to write beautiful Ruby code.

Sandi Metz

Don’t write code you’ll need to explain. Write code that explains itself.

Nationality: American

Sandi is a globally respected Ruby educator, consultant, and author who has elevated the craft of writing object-oriented code.

She wrote the best-selling book Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby (POODR) in 2012, which is considered a must-read classic by Rubyists – “anyone who programs Ruby has heard of POODR.” Through POODR and her follow-up work (99 Bottles of OOP), Sandi taught a generation of developers how to design flexible, maintainable Ruby apps. She is a sought-after conference speaker known for crystal-clear, friendly explanations of principles like SOLID, and for live-refactoring sessions. Sandi’s influence can be felt in countless codebases that apply her teachings (e.g. smaller classes, clear interfaces). Beyond writing, she coaches teams and gives workshops on practical OOD. Her mantra “prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction” has saved many projects from over-engineering. In short, Sandi Metz shaped Ruby programming style as much as Rails did – by showing that good design matters.

She continues to inspire through talks and her work in the community, making complex ideas accessible to all.

Mike Perham

Nationality: American

Mike is the author of Sidekiq, the immensely popular background job processing framework for Ruby. Sidekiq (launched 2012) introduced multithreading to Ruby job runners, dramatically improving throughput and efficiency.

It quickly became the dominant solution for handling background tasks in Rails apps, replacing previous alternatives (Resque, DelayedJob) and even influencing Rails to become thread-safe by default. Mike not only built the open-source Sidekiq (which millions of sites use), but also a sustainable business by offering Sidekiq Pro/Enterprise add-ons – pioneering the “open-core” model in the Ruby world. He later created Faktory, a polyglot background job system. Mike’s contributions go beyond code: through his blog and talks, he has educated developers on writing thread-safe Ruby and scaling systems. By relentlessly focusing on simplicity and performance, he kept Sidekiq lean and fast, often sharing benchmarking insights.

His work has arguably powered a huge portion of the Ruby ecosystem (any app with background processing likely uses Sidekiq). Mike remains active maintaining Sidekiq (now at version 8+) and engaging with the community on performance topics. He exemplifies the indie OSS entrepreneur – showing that one Rubyist can change the landscape for everyone.

Avdi Grimm

Avdi Grimm - Top 17 Ruby Developers You Should Know

Nationality: American

Avdi is a prominent Ruby guru who has spent over a decade teaching and inspiring developers.

He’s the creator of RubyTapas, a popular screencast series of bite-sized Ruby videos that ran for 7+ years, through which he taught thousands of subscribers intermediate and advanced Ruby techniques. Avdi has also authored books like Confident Ruby (32 patterns for writing joyful code) and Exceptional Ruby, and was a host on the Ruby Rogues podcast. A recipient of the Ruby Hero Award for his community contributions, Avdi is known for championing object-oriented design (he even co-taught Sandi Metz’s POODR course) and for his approachable explanations. He has a talent for taking a messy piece of Ruby code and refactoring it live into something elegant – imparting lessons on block usage, dependency injection, and more along the way. Avdi’s blog posts and talks often delve into idiomatic Ruby patterns, helping developers “level up” their craft.

Beyond content creation, he’s contributed to open source (like early improvements to Ruby’s core and libraries) and remains an active mentor. In the Ruby community, Avdi Grimm is synonymous with pragmatic Ruby wisdom.

Hiroshi Shibata

Nationality: Japanese

Hiroshi (often known as “hsbt”) is an essential caretaker of Ruby’s ecosystem.

He wears multiple hats: Ruby core committer, release manager for Ruby distributions, and the lead maintainer of RubyGems (the package manager) and Bundler. Hiroshi ensures that gem installation and dependency management work seamlessly for millions of Rubyists – he oversees RubyGems releases and infrastructure. He has also contributed code to MRI and is a maintainer of tools like rbenv and ruby-build (for managing Ruby versions). As a “full-time OSS developer” working at Shopify, Shibata-san helps coordinate the Ruby release process and often proposes improvements (for example, he shepherded the merging of Bundler into RubyGems). He’s deeply involved in community efforts: he’s on Ruby’s release team and was president of Ruby Association in Japan, playing a big role in Ruby Kaigi conferences.

In short, when you install Ruby or gem install something, Hiroshi Shibata’s work is behind the scenes making it smooth. His dedication keeps the Ruby ecosystem’s wheels greased and running, and he advocates for the health of OSS maintainers. Few people realize how much we rely on him – but the core team does, which is why he’s a valued member of Ruby’s leadership.

Sam Saffron

Nationality: Australian

Sam is a prominent entrepreneur-developer who co-founded Discourse, a popular open-source forum platform built with Ruby and Rails.

As CTO of Discourse, Sam has steered its technical architecture since 2013, creating a robust Rails application that serves millions of users across hundreds of communities. He’s a performance maven: before Discourse, Sam created mini_profiler, the performance profiling tool widely used in Rails apps to find slowness (later integrated into Stack Overflow and many sites). He also built memory_profiler and other dev utilities, sharing them freely. Sam is deeply involved in the Ruby performance community – he co-hosted Ruby Bench and often collaborates with Ruby core team members to test Ruby upgrades against real Discourse benchmarks. Under the hood, he’s contributed patches to Rails and even tweaks to MRI to fix memory bloat issues encountered in production.

Sam is also generous with his knowledge: he’s active on forums (including Discourse Meta and Rails discussions), blogging tips about PostgreSQL tuning, GC tweaks, etc., that he implements for Discourse. By open-sourcing Discourse, Sam gave the Ruby world a flagship example of a large, modern Rails app to learn from. And by continuously pushing for better performance – “fast, yet pleasant” as he likes – he has nudged both Rails and Ruby to improve. In sum, Sam Saffron exemplifies the hacker-founder: using Ruby to build a successful product and giving back improvements to the community along the way.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. If you intend to share or make use of it in any way, we kindly ask that you include a backlink to the original source – EchoGlobal.

Ready to get started?