Talk Synopsis

Over the past few years, Nokogiri has slowly eclipsed older XML parsing libraries to garner nearly 10 million downloads from rubygems.org.

But why another XML parsing library? Isn't it boring? And what does "nokogiri" mean in Japanese, anyway?

These questions will be answered, and I'll do a brief dive into all the technologies that we use to make Nokogiri a fast, reliable and robust gem. Topics will include:

  • Origins of the project: motivation, problems and impact
  • Native C and Java extensions
  • FFI, and how to know if it's Right For You
  • Debugging tools (valgrind, perftools)
  • Packaging tools (mini_portile, rake-compiler)
  • Installation issues, and what we're doing to help
  • Feature roadmap

Biography

Mike Dalessio has a serious job as Director of Pivotal Labs NYC, where he hardly ever gets to write software anymore. But that doesn't mean he's all business -- he's been having super happy fun times coding for over 20 years.

Co-author of Nokogiri, Enterprisey Doer of Good Deeds and veteran of startup failure and success, this Rubyist believes Elvis is still alive and considers 72 columns the canonical code width (because, FORTRAN, that's why).