Panel: Charles Max Wood

Guest: Victor Shepelev

This week on My Ruby Story, Charles talks with Victor Shepelev who is a Ruby programmer and also a poet. He works for Verbit.ai and lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Chuck and Victor talk about his background, how Victor got into Ruby, and his latest projects.

In particular, we dive pretty deep on:

1:13 – Chuck: Episode 367 – check it out!

1:37 – Background?

1:42 – Living in Ukraine.

2:08 – Chuck: How did you get into programming?

2:18 – Victor: I broke my leg and very bored. In ‘85-‘86 and I was gaming. Since then I got into programming and have been in it for 20 years.

3:20 – Chuck: Prince of Persia.

3:26 – Chuck: What made you stick with programming?

3:34 – Victor: I think it was magically and exotic. It still fascinates me.

4:03 – Chuck: How did you get into Ruby?

4:15 – Victor: There are great several programming attitudes – but I belong to the one that just write texts that expose the meanings. I like the text. I am a poet. When I write in Ruby (not like poetry), I write texts and that is what I’m thinking about. I loved C-Plus, Plus in the early 2000’s. For me it wasn’t fully expressive enough. I tried other things and searched other options. I met Ruby and it was love at the first sight.

7:09 – Chuck: What have you done with Ruby that you are proud of?

7:18 – Victor: The project takes my time is data integrated into itself: countries, planets, famous paintings, and so on. It’s really cool.

9:49 – Chuck: Where can you find this project?

9:54: Victor – GitHub and some conferences.

10:27 – Chuck: You mentioned being in a company that does translation?

10:33 – Victor: Yes. It is written in Python.

11:11 – Chuck: What are you working on now?

11:18 – Victor: Yes, this project and last year I got into development of Ruby itself. I wasn’t that proficient. I am not contributing to the language itself but creating documentation (program language reference) and new features of Ruby.

12:40 – Chuck: What is the Ruby community like in Ukraine?

12:46 – Victor: It is pretty large. Don’t know if it is large to U.S. standards.

Meetups happens every once to twice a month in my city.

Recent years it has gotten smaller, because I don’t know if they are going to the new “hip” technology.

14:16 – Chuck: We’d have Meetups like 30-40-50 people and now it’s only 10-20.

Different companies are moving to different things that they need.

14:43 – Victor: In Ukraine I think a lot of people are doing a lot of opensource. I think it will still grow to some extent.

15:29 – Chuck: It’s not that Ruby is dying per se. Ruby hit a stride when web was hot. Now we are seeing growth in AI or IOT. For example people are reaching to Python for the mathematics and scientific side to it.

16:17 – Victor adds in his comments.

Victor: I had some high hopes for Rails.

18:14 – Chuck comments.

Chuck: It would be interesting to see bindings. See these other options come forward.

18:39 – Victor.

19:10 – Chuck: Picks!

19:14 – Advertisement.

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Charles

Victor