Peter Burns

Dr. Nic has apparently made it his mission to encourage developers in the Ruby community to contribute back.

For me, it's worked. Since reading his article on how to contribute to an open source project[1] I've submitted two patches to a library that I found myself using.

Likewise, his work with the newgem project takes care of many of the more obnoxious and fuzzy problems of packaging and documenting code. It combines a number of other good tools in this area, and integrates them to produce a whole that is far more usable.

I'm launching three different projects that never would have existed without newgem.

1) http://drnicwilliams.com/2007/06/01/8-steps-for-fixing-other-peoples-code/