Dmitry Lipovoi Winner RPCFN - 10

In this brief interview, Satish Talim of RubyLearning talks to Dmitry Lipovoi of Russia, winner of the tenth Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies.

Satish>> Welcome Dmitry and thanks for taking out time to share your thoughts. For the benefit of the readers, could you tell us something about your self?

Dmitry>> Hey. My name is Dmitry, and I’ve been programming since I was 14 years old, when I made my first “Hello World” in Pascal work. I’m absolutely sure that programming should be fun if you’re not doing something wrong

Satish>> How did you get involved with Ruby programming?

Dmitry>> About one and a half years back I discovered Ryan Bates’ RailsCasts. It was really inspiring, so I started to look at how these things work. That was my first Ruby experience.

Then I read a few articles on TDD/BDD in Ruby and that was the point of no return. It was so easy and natural in comparison with my Java experience that I haven’t stopped playing with it since then.

Satish>> Could you name three features of Ruby that you like the most, as compared to other languages? Why?

Dmitry>>

1. I like Ruby for its pure object oriented approach. I mean, for example Java and many other mainstream languages are more “class oriented”. They have classes as something special, as their main idea. But Ruby is different. Object is the center of the universe in Ruby and not class. And it’s really great.
2. Blocks. Definitely one of the most useful things in Ruby. Maybe it’s not a unique feature, but it really rocks!
3. Although it’s not a plain feature of the language, I very much like Ruby’s approach to testing. The Ruby community is considered as the “most testing community” and I like that. Testing makes it easy to dig into a new project when you try to understand how things work, how they should be used. And almost any open source Ruby project has a good test suite.

Satish>> How was experience of taking part in the Ruby Programming Challenge For Newbies (RPCFN)?

Dmitry>> It reminds me of the good old days when I participated in ICPC. Quite fun.

Actually not so many challenges judge your code. And I’m glad to see that for RPCFN code beauty is important.

Also it was nice to discover other solutions and see the different approaches to the problem. Some of them are really worth looking into.

Satish>> You are based in Russia. How is the Ruby and Rails scenario there?

Dmitry>> Unfortunately Ruby isn’t much popular here.

Nevertheless the community is growing little by little and I can see that a couple of projects, here and there, use Ruby. But it’s still nothing in comparison with PHP or Java.

Satish>> What are your future plans?

Dmitry>> In the near future I’d like to move from Java to Ruby completely; dig deeper into the Rails 3 source and participate in other open source Ruby projects.

Also, I’m going to participate in Gregory Brown’s Ruby Mendicant University this autumn. And I would like to thank him for such an opportunity.

Thank you Dmitry. In case you have any queries and/or questions, kindly post your questions here (as comments to this blog post) and Dmitry would be glad to answer.