Once a Maintainer: Rafael França - by Allison Pike

The Rails Core member on new releases and balancing pushing the community forward with stabilityI guess I always wanted to be part of Rails Core, at least as soon as I knew what the Rails Core team actually was. But in reality, how it came to be is that one of the Rails Core team members was José Valim - he was the first Brazilian person I knew that was working on open source projects as big as Rails.Of course later I learned that there are more, but at the time he was the only person that looked like me that was on a team that important, and I wanted to work with him. One year later I was moving to São Paulo to work with José, and I learned a lot. I started maintaining a few open source projects like devise and simple_form. A year later I decided that I would try to help with Rails. I was basically mimicking his steps, doing what he was doing.