Mr. Sam Ruby

A prominent software developer, he has made significant contributions to web standards and open source software projects. In particular he has contributed to the standardization of syndicated web feeds via his involvement with the Atom standard and the Feed Validator web service. He received a B.A. degree in Mathematics from Christopher Newport University, in Newport News, Virginia and was hired by IBM immediately out of college. He currently holds a Senior Technical Staff Member position in the Emerging Technologies Group and resides in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a co-Chair of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s HTML Working Group. He is a current Director of the Apache Software Foundation, an American non-profit corporation (classified as 501(c)(3) in the United States) to support Apache software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server. He is the foundation's Assistant Secretary; served as Vice President of Legal Affairs and was the former Chair of the Apache Jakarta Project. He also actively contributes to numerous Apache projects; the ASF Committers page provides a complete and current listing of Apache projects to which he is actively contributing. Notably, he was one of the early Ant contributors, as well as being the creator of Gump, an open source continuous integration system, which aims to build and test all the open source Java projects, every night. Its aim is to make sure that all the projects are compatible, at both the API level and in terms of functionality matching specifications. He is the principal maintainer of the Feed Validator validator, which he developed along with Mark Pilgrim. The Feed Validator About page states, "The validator was conceived and designed by Mark Pilgrim, who also wrote most of the test cases and designed the web front end. Much of the actual back end coding was done by Sam Ruby." It's able to validate Atom feeds as well as RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 feeds. He also contributed to the PHP Group, a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language. He contributed in particular to the Java Extension. He has done development in the Ruby programming language, leading to some confusion between the person's name and the language. However, there is no formal connection?they both just coincidentally have the same name. He is the author of Venus, an Atom/RSS feed aggregator, the codebase that began as a radical refactoring of the Planet 2.0 feed aggregator in 2006. He was an early adopter of HTML5, and has offered a number of concrete proposals which were subsequently incorporated into the HTML5 draft. He has been appointed co-chair of the W3C's HTML Working Group from January 5, 2009. He is also a developer member of the html5lib project, with his primary contribution being the initial port of html5lib to the Ruby programming language. He has also been active within various standards development organizations. He was the convener of the ECMA TC39 group that standardized the Common Language Infrastructure for Microsoft's .NET Framework. The project which eventually became the Atom web feed standard was started by a blog posting which he published in 2002 entitled "What Makes A Log Entry". This blog posting eventually became a wiki project which acted as a rallying point for people looking to improve upon the frozen RSS format. He was the secretary of the IETF AtomPub working group. This working group completed RFC 4287, the Atom format specification ("The Atom Syndication Format"), in December 2005 and RFC 5023, "The Atom Publishing Protocol", in October 2007. He is a member of the ECMAScript technical committee (ECMAScript TC39); his primary contribution to the group is in driving the effort to add Decimal support to ECMAScript. Other publications he has authored or co-authored are: ?Agile Web Development with Rails 4? (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2013) (with Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson) ISBN 1-937-78556-4; ?RESTful Web APIs? (O'Reilly Publishing, 2013) (with Leonard Richardson and Mike Amundsen) ISBN 1-449-35806-3; ?Agile Web Development with Rails 3.2? (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2011) (with Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson) ISBN 1-934-35654-9; ?Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition? (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2009) (with Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson) ISBN 1-934-35616-6; and ?RESTful Web Services? (O'Reilly Publishing, 2007) (with Leonard Richardson) ISBN 0-596-52926-0