Meet Tom Stuart Jun 4 2014

Could you introduce yourself in a few lines?

Hi, I’m Tom. I’m a computer scientist and a Ruby programmer. I’ve lectured on optimising compilers at the University of Cambridge, I co-organise the Ruby Manor conference, and I’m a member of the London Ruby User Group. Last year I wrote a book for O’Reilly called “Understanding Computation”, which used Ruby to explain ideas from theoretical computer science.

You're giving a talk at Rulu this year. What will you talk about?

I’ll be talking about a cool program manipulation technique called “partial evaluation”. I’ll explain how it works, how it can be used to make programs go faster, and what fun stuff happens when you run a partial evaluator on itself.

Three properties:

• You code with: Vim
• You test with: Cucumber, RSpec
• If Ruby was forbidden, you would code in: Clojure

What Lyonnaise specialty will you give a try this year?

What are you working on these days?

I’m writing a self-published ebook and screencast about how to create a Ruby web application without relying on a framework.

What are the talks, books, libraries or commands you think more people should be aware of - because, well, they make your life so much better!

I think Rich Hickey’s “Simple Made Easy” talk should be required viewing for anyone who makes software. Likewise, Eric Evans’ “Domain-Driven Design” book, and the GOOS book, are extremely helpful for getting to grips with the complexity of object-oriented design.

Anything to add before we wrap this up?

I still get daily enjoyment out of using Ruby and I’m looking forward to hearing about what other people are doing with it at RuLu. See you there!