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In Memoriam - Noah Gibbs

Credit: Olivier Lacan

The Ruby Community has lost one of its titans.

Noah Gibbs contributed to our community to such a great an extent in so many different ways in such a long period of time. It is a genuine challenge to sit down at a keyboard and capture a picture of this wonderful person.

However, I think it's important to take a few moments and give a testimony about someone who has meant so much to you. Why? Well, for the record. During my years of Ruby Archaeology (via newsletter, talk, blog or conversation) I found it incredibly valuable to see what the community had to say about someone who they had lost. Ezra, Chris, Jason, _why, those impacted by them took time to share their story and impact on their lives. Here is mine.

Meeting Noah

I've looked up to Noah since I joined the community in 2014. He was "Ruby Famous" to me, and I very much enjoyed his talks, writing, books and posts.

Flash forward to the 2020's, when we were coworkers. Thanks to a lot of work and luck I found myself on the Ruby & Rails Infrastructure Team at Shopify. Not long after, Noah joined. He wasn't a stranger at this point.. We'd engaged a fair bit on social media over the years. But I was thrilled to have him on my team! Isn't that like, your dream?

Our interactions got more and more frequent. Noah popped up in a virtual ScotRug meetup (I live in Belfast, Noah in Inverness). I was pitching a talk idea where I would delve into old Ruby code. Noah's encouragement and mentorship resulted in me giving this talk at Ruby Kaigi, Ruby Conf, and Rails Conf. It even inspired a sequel talk that was also given at Ruby Kaigi, Ruby Conf and Rails Conf. Our ensuing work together would inspire my talk in the slot just before Noah at Brighton Ruby on Desktop Ruby development.

Isn't it amazing what a little bit of support or encouragement can do?

Working with Noah

Noah was a supreme joy to work with. I'm sure this surprises no one. Noah made me feel proud of myself! He left me feeling inspired, curious and excited for my craft. I would share something "cool" with him and he'd give me half a dozen interesting ideas I could jump into off of that idea. We could talk for hours.

In the private team chat you could always rely on him for a good geek out session. We were OBSESSED with the winter and summer solstices and how long/short the days get in Inverness and Belfast. It's really bonkers. We loved a good whisky chat (and why not! we live in whisky central!)

Noah could criticize something in good faith in a kind way. He wouldn't really, shy away, from a spicy opinion. But he never gave it in a way that made you feel bad about yourself. What I'm saying is he wasn't squishy! But he was also incredibly aware of others and their feelings and just the nuance of life that we always have to dance around.

He always had joy for the craft. It never got old. For fun we once revisited the Ruby Koans from Edgecase and I specifically recall just how fired up he was about the silly little things a string can do in Ruby.

Scarpe

Noah, Marco Rudilosso and I founded the Scarpe project in January 2022. The project was a simple idea: take a stab at getting feature parity with _why's Shoes.rb using Webview. Our thinking was Webview gives us the backend we want. Here's some HTML, now build it into multiple different packages for different platforms. So, how could we rebuild the Shoes DSL in _Ruby_ to push out raw HTML that would be fed to Webview?

We made a decent amount of progress. In the end, Noah became the main engineering force. Although I am the maintainer, Noah (with full admin rights) doubled my commit count in the project. He also was the engineering architect behind most of our challenging work and decisions.

During our time on the team, Noah (essentially as the other half leading the project):

  • Helped facilitate weekly Scarpe meetings
  • Single handedly wrote our massive wiki covering everything from Shoes history to reasoning behind our decisions.
  • Mentored multiple engineers who joined us as an official Google Summer of Code Ruby Project
  • All the while giving me the space as Maintainer to help set the vision and direction of the project, where he had every right to push me out
  • Invented the SpaceShoes prototype, which would let coders write Shoes Ruby code for the browser directly in their HTML.
  • Published a working fork of _why's music library bloopsaphone. <-- This was needed for Shoes, but is its own independent library he helped save.
  • Implemented half a dozen new repos around Scarpe. This included implementations in GTK+ and WASM
  • Built Highlander which is without a doubt my favourite Shoes app of all time

I stepped back a bit from Scarpe in 2024 due to the birth of our first child. I am sad knowing that my future work on this project will be a little bit more lonely. Noah knew the codebase and history better than anyone alive. Our most recent chat in mid-October was him thanking me for finally turning off Rubocop. It's funny how much he disliked the linter! Which is fair enough - he had written Ruby in his own flair for years before standardized linting. Many of us have had lint beaten into our heads. I think I'll keep the linter out going forward.

More Noah stuff

How to Honour Noah's Memory

Here is a message from Krissy:

What you can do for Noah is to dig deep into where you live. Meet more people. Say hello when it is hard. Take risks on people. Help every chance you get. Never forget his example. There is always more you have to give, and learn and do.

Never stop growing.

That's how you can honor Noah. It's all he wants for you

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