Matz Well then, Mr. Kokubun. Congratulations on your nomination.
 
Kokubun Thank you.
 
Matz Congratulations on being nominated for the Ruby Prize.
For the readers who may not know much about you, could you briefly introduce your current activities?

 
Kokubun Certainly. For the past 3 to 4 years my work has been using Ruby to develop Ruby on Rails (RoR) applications and as a hobby I often develop template engines. I often use the template language Haml so I developed a faster version of it called Hamlit, and the creators of Haml invited me to help its development as I could use my Hamlit ideas to provide feedback to them. I figured I could also use these on ERB, a template engine which exclusively uses Ruby so I’ve been implementing those ideas wherever I can. Recently, I’ve been writing a JIT compiler in my free time and I’m working on developing something that only needs CRuby to work.
 
Matz Listening to your response, I think we could say that “Speeding up” is a keyword.
 
Kokubun You could say that.
 
Matz It’s something you were aiming for, not just happened to find.
 
Kokubun When I started working on bas development for Cookpad, there was a focus on raising productivity. Ruby was involved in many of the elements which needed a productivity increase.
 
Matz There are times you need to wait, after all.
 
Kokubun Exactly. It was particularly slow with Cookpad. The scale was very large. I wanted Ruby to be faster but the core of rails was also slow. Originally I tried many things to make RoR’ layers faster then I started working on template engines and then the core of Ruby. It became my hobby.
 
Matz I see, thank you very much. So I’m to understand that you worked on speed as there was a necessity.
 
Kokubun Originally, yes. But as I worked on it the work itself became fun.
 
Matz Did you have any particular interest in speeding up development before this?
 
Kokubun No, I didn’t. I started programming with Ruby so I don’t have any other particular experience.
 
Matz I see. So as you developed and worked with Ruby speed eventually became a theme for you.
 
Kokubun It became a hobby.