Dan’s post in another thread got me thinking about this.
Who are your Ruby Heroes (and if you want to share, why) 
My Ruby Hero is Aaron Patterson! 
I would love to be as good in Ruby/Rails as he is, and to imitate that awesome awful pun humor that he displays on twitter! =) 
My puns always come by accident. I can never seem to do it on purpose the way he can … and the to point that it really makes people groan! =)
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Yep, Aaron is awesome - a great role model for the Ruby community
Your puns are much better than mine! Mine are so bad I have just given up, lol.
Ack!
Don’t give up!
The more you practice, and the worse your puns get, the day will come it will be on par of being groan-worthy as his are!
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I have sooooo many Ruby Heroes! 
Obviously Matz for giving us Ruby and for being an all round nice guy
DHH for giving us Rails, drawing our attention to Ruby, and for helping make Ruby a success
Russ Olsen, one of my favourite authors who has also been really helpful and supportive both publicly and privately. Such an amazing guy!
Prag prog crew for being such an excellent resource
Ryan Bigg for being the one who told me to just learn Ruby! (And recommending The Well Grounded Rubyist and for our email chats)
Ryan Bates for Railscasts and all the help and support
@adambeynon for giving us Opal! And the rest of the Opal team of course 
@ryanstout for giving is Volt!
Gregg Pollack, who’s email to me once was the highlight of my entire year!
All my Ruby friends on Twitter (you know who you are!) who have always been supportive and are always pushing me to do/learn more.
And of course all the important Ruby folk like Aaron Patterson for everything they do in Ruby - many I have probably not even heard of.
All of the above deserve a medal too, cos, in case you haven’t noticed I am the sort of person who will cheekily email people, or keep pestering them until they talk to me, haha 
Genuine thanks to all Rubyists who make the Ruby community very special 
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go on, tell us the story then 
It all started in the Rails chat room - I kept asking loads of really simple questions (though obviously to me at the time were really complicated, lol!) and while Ryan was really helpful, he said you could easily learn Ruby (I know now that he could probably say this to anyone - cos Ruby is so easy!). So he made me feel like I could do it - when I always thought that I couldn’t be a programmer as I didn’t have the brain for it. He recommended the Well Grounded Rubyist and I bought it and just couldn’t put it down - David is such an excellent teacher!
So I am forever grateful. Also, a year or so later, he emailed me to tell me my ‘Best way to learn Ruby and Rails’ blog post is now returned with the !learn helper bot thingy in the Rails IRC chat room. How awesome was that!?
Kudos to Ryan and kudos to you too for persisting and learning Ruby. I’ve learned the biggest mistake good developers do is under-estimating themselves.
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Ruby Heroes?
Currently there are three:
- Matz for creating ruby
- Jim Weirich for creating rake (which I do use not only for ruby!)
- Ryan Bates for railscasts. They really were masterpieces, and I am missing similar quality ressources that are free for other languages/frameworks
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