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Comment by d4mi3n | Hacker News Reader

For those unaware: Aaron Patterson, aka tenderlove, is an influential and longstanding personality in the ruby community who’s made many significant contributions to Ruby and Ruby on Rails over the years.

He’s also a fantastic writer with a quirky style, highly recommend perusing his technical writing: http://tenderlovemaking.com/

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I've had the pleasure of meeting Aaron at a number of ruby confs. He's supportive from the largest all the way to the smallest.

My personal favorite thing he'll do is ask conference speakers questions that make the speaker look good/best-light-possible. Something slightly technical/challenging, not fully covered in the talk but definitely something the speaker can handle.

To be able to do this consistently means he knows the topic better than the speaker themselves (at least this has been true when I've been there).

This is in contrast to people who ask "gotcha" questions. Spend 3-4 minutes showing off their knowledge and then finally getting to the question which is to stump the speaker. I hate these kinds of people at conferences the most.

Surely that's not a dichotomy. Sometimes I ask a question myself. Invariably it's because I'm practically interested in the answer.

It's not a dichotomy. There are obviously more than 2 types of question askers.

This is more of a juxtaposition.

His keynotes for RailsConfs are among the best talks I've ever watched. You always start off thinking it's just a comedy routine but by the end you know a lot more about Rails and Ruby than you did before.

Also, you may learn a bit about his other passions. I once learned a fair bit about curing meats (and probably something about ruby, I guess) from tenderlove at one of his talks.

He's also making cheese!

I remember running into him at Rails at RailsConf in Phoenix a few years go and brought up his work on the Rails journey router, which is an NFA and his eyes lit up and was really excited that someone appreciated and understood that crucial yet under the hood part of the Rails core. It was enjoyable to talk and meet him.

Thank you so much, I really appreciate it. I really should blog more, I just haven't been "feeling it" lately. Words of encouragement really help, so thank you so much! :D

His handle and domain name are super gross. Every time I visit his website, woth its icky tagline, I feel the need to disinfect my eyeballs

Yet you keep visiting his website despite how gross it is for you? Wow. That's some sacrifice you're making only to learn more about Ruby. I suggest the community gives you the Ruby Hero award wdyt? I'm not being totally sarcastic (only a bit) this shows some true grit on your part.

"Join STEM and build for the future! Don't let the cliche and sexist past our industry is known by prevent you from succeeding!"

"Oh, you want to learn about low-level Ruby internals? I know a good blog... but, oh, about that.."

no one is stopping them from being garbage collectors or construction workers either.

maybe they just arent interested in STEM, as a whole. is that so bad?

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