Meet Software Engineer and Ruby Innovator Joel Drapper | Speedify LIVE

On the 129th episode of Speedify LIVE we are talking technology more than ever, as we’re joined by software engineer Joel Drapper, the creator of Phlex – the framework for building view components in Ruby.

We chat about Ruby vs other programming languages, what Joel likes about programming, books and text editors, and what’s next for Joel.

Here are our 5 takeaways from our tech talk with Joel Drapper:

1. While Joel’s project, Naming Things, is pre-recorded it’s pretty much as if it were done live! The idea is that he wants to show the behind the scenes of coding as he just gets on a call with a partner, hits record, and just goes for it, without rehearsing, and with very little editing afterwards to show the entire process. 
2. Joel says that he fell in love with Ruby, and Ruby on Rails after being exposed to it at a young age. He says that while Ruby is a very basic language you can express yourself in, almost in pure English, and has a standard library, Rails is the web framework that’s built on that, and allows you to build web applications pretty quickly and easily. 
3. Phlex, with a PH, is Joel’s current project: named to resemble other, related libraries, to be easily remembered and combined with other terms, like “phlex component”. It was written by Joel himself, and has been pushed to beta recently so people can start using it in production, as long as they are also testing it properly. 
4. When it comes to text editors, fonts and terminals, Joel has his favorites: Nova by Panic is a text editor that, according to Joel, may be even better than the discontinued Atom at this point; his font of choice is JetBrains Mono, which he likes for its readability; and he uses warp.dev as his terminal. 
5. If anyone wants to get into Ruby or programming in general, Joel recommends a number of great books: Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, Practical Object-oriented Design, The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Refactoring, The Pragmatic Programmer, Grokking Algorithms  are all books he would highly recommend – along with some video courses.