Sam Ruby is a prominent software developer who has made significant contributions to web standards and open source software projects. In particular he has contributed to the standardization of syndicated web feeds via his involvement with the Atom standard and the Feed Validator web service.
Ruby is a former board member of the Apache Software Foundation.[3] He formerly served as president; Assistant Secretary; Director, Vice President of Legal Affairs; and was the former Chair of the Apache Jakarta Project. He also actively contributes to numerous Apache projects. Notably, he was one of the early Ant contributors, as well as being the creator of Gump.
Ruby is the principal maintainer of the Feed validator, which he developed along with Mark Pilgrim.[4] It's able to validate Atom feeds as well as RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 feeds.
Sam Ruby has done development in the Ruby programming language, leading to some confusion between the person's name and the language. However, there is no formal connection—they both just coincidentally have the same name.
The project which eventually became the Atom web feed standard was started by a blog posting by Sam Ruby in 2002 entitled "what makes a log entry". This blog posting eventually became a wiki project which acted as a rallying point for people looking to improve upon the frozen RSS format.[9] Sam Ruby was the secretary of the IETF AtomPub working group. This working group completed RFC 4287, the Atom format specification ("The Atom Syndication Format"), in December 2005 and RFC 5023, "The Atom Publishing Protocol", in October 2007.
Ruby is a member of the ECMAScript technical committee (ECMAScript TC39); his primary contribution to the group is in driving the effort to add Decimal support to ECMAScript.
Ruby was an early adopter of HTML5, and has offered a number of concrete proposals which were subsequently incorporated into the HTML5 draft. He has been appointed co-chair of the W3C's HTML Working Group from 5 January 2009.[10]
