Sam Ruby

Co-developer and principal maintainer of the Feed Validator — a tool used to check the validity of HTML, CSS, XML documents, and RSS feeds — Ruby has made significant contributions to web standards and open source software projects. In particular he 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 has held a Senior Technical Staff Member position in the Emerging Technologies Group and has resided in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Ruby has served as co-Chair of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s HTML Working Group. He has served as a 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 has served as the foundation's Assistant Secretary, as Vice President of Legal Affairs, and as the former Chair of the Apache Jakarta Project. He also actively contributed to numerous Apache projects; the ASF Committers page provides a complete and current listing of Apache projects to which he contributed.

Notably, Ruby was one of the early Ant contributors, as well as being the creator of Gump, an open source continuous integration system, which aimed to build and test all the open source Java projects every night. Its aim was to make sure that all the projects were compatible, at both the API level and in terms of functionality matching specifications.

He has served as the principal maintainer of the Feed 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 was 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.

Ruby 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 did development work 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 was 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. Ruby was an early adopter of HTML5 and offered a number of concrete proposals which were subsequently incorporated into the HTML5 draft. He was appointed co-chair of the W3C's HTML Working Group from January 5, 2009. He was also a developer member of the html5lib project, with his primary contribution being the initial port of html5lib to the Ruby programming language.

Ruby has also been active within various standards development organizations. He has served as 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 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 has served as 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. Ruby has been a member of the ECMAScript technical committee (ECMAScript TC39); his primary contribution to the group was in driving the effort to add Decimal support to ECMAScript.

Other publications he authored or co-authored include: "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.