Matz Congratulations for winning the Ruby Prize.
 
Kamizono Thank you very much.
 
Matz Thank you. Mr. Kamizono…

Kamizono Yes?

Matz It’s strange to call you “Mr. Kamizono.”

Kamizono You and all my colleagues usually call me “Kamipo”

Matz That’s true.
Could I get you in to first introduce yourself and your usual activities?

Kamizono Sure. I think the nomination for the Ruby Prize is due to my continued contribution to the Ruby on Rails (RoR) component ActiveRecord, which is an O/R mapping tool. I’ve been working on it for quite some time, and this year DHH added me to their committer team. I heard from Mr. Matsuda that he never heard of someone becoming a committer without having first met DHH.
 
Matz You never met him?
 
Kamizono Never.
 
Matz Oh, I see. That’s quite rare.
 
Kamizono I’ve been contributing actively enough to somehow manage to make a presence without having met him.
 
Matz You are contributing an incredible amount at an incredible pace aren’t you.
 
Kamizono Yes, I think my level of activity might be the highest among contributors these past few years.
 
Matz What is the source of your motivation?
 
Kamizono My motivation?
 
Matz Is it not just for one or two days, you do an incredible amount of contributions over a short time.

Kamizono That’s true. I originally have a technical background, working with MySQL. RoR doesn’t work very well with MySQL. RoR has a history of 10 years and 10 years ago people probably weren’t that familiar with MySQL. So I was working with code written when MySQL was unknown. So I tried operating my RoR applications by hand using workarounds to avoid the underlying issues. So I started to throw patches at it. But after I started using patches a new version of RoR was released, not including my patch.
 
Matz And you thought, “damn it”?
 
Kamizono Yeah, that’s what I thought. I started by patching the thing which bothered me the most. If I looked for things I wanted to patch I could find an unlimited number of them, but even my patch for this thing that was obviously troubling everyone couldn’t get reviewed for inclusion. I was shocked. So then I thought I need to increase my activity. If for nothing else, to get attention for patches I want included. So I added a lot of patches to pile the pressure on.
 
Matz Increase your presence through activity?
 
Kamizono Yes, this all started when I tried to establish a presence by throwing in lots of patches.
And at first I imposed this rule on myself that I’m not allowed to run out or slow down. But over the years I’ve looked at a lot of code and their background and at why this works, or that this being written here means this part manifests itself in this way and I bagan to understand the mechanisms. At first things were difficult to fix but now I have the sense that I can fix all these bugs and issues, and as I continue it continues to become interesting to me.