Xavier Noria: The Code Gardener

Xavier won the Ruby Hero award in 2010

Xavier Noria (pronounced “sha - vee - aay “ in Catalan) is very well known in the Ruby community. A self-employed Ruby developer from Barcelona, he’s also a member of the Rails core team and won the Ruby Hero award during RailsConf 2010. Many of you may have met him in person; he has presented at numerous Ruby conferences all across Europe this year.

But I’m most impressed by Xavier’s role as the “Code Gardener” - a phrase I took from a minor Rails commit he made over two years ago. You can read more about this commit in an article I wrote last year about my favorite Rails commits. Last week Xavier and I had a chance to talk for over an hour - read the interview on RubySource.com to learn more about his background, what’s coming in Rails 4, his passion for documentation and most importantly his philosophy about the importance of small changes. I also got a chance to ask Xavier about how you can determine if a number is prime using a regular expression!