Aaron Patterson, known online as tenderlove, works at Shopify on Ruby and Rails. He co-created the Nokogiri document-parsing library and wrote Psych, Ruby’s YAML parser.[1][2][3]
Start with Nokogiri →
X Career
Patterson’s public GitHub identity links him to Shopify and his tenderlovemaking.com site. In his Open Source Stories interview he describes working on Ruby core and Rails core development. This places his work at two levels: the programming language and the web framework built on it. He also discusses contributing to open source as a way to demonstrate work after leaving college without finishing. The interview establishes that experience without identifying a degree or school.[1][2]
Contributions
Nokogiri lets Ruby programs read, query and modify HTML or XML documents. Patterson identifies Mike Dalessio as his co-creator, while the repository explains its use of native parsing libraries behind the Ruby interface. Psych handles YAML, a common format for configuration files, by wrapping libyaml and converting between YAML documents and Ruby objects. These are infrastructure contributions: applications can use familiar Ruby interfaces instead of implementing document parsers themselves.[3][4][6]
Ideas
His technical blog follows the code behind language behavior. In Static Analysis for the Uninitialized, published in October 2026, he works through concepts from static program analysis, which studies a program without executing each possible input. The article shows the same educational style as his public talks: build enough of the mechanism that a developer can see where a result comes from, rather than treating the runtime as a black box.[5]
Tools, writing & talks
Tools
Start here
Nokogiri
github.comParses and queries HTML and XML through a Ruby API backed by native parsers.
Begin with Nokogiri’s small document-query examples if you know Ruby. They show the library’s purpose immediately; the static-analysis essay is a deeper next step for understanding implementation.
Writing, research & talks
- OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerabilitytenderlovemaking.com
A Ruby maintainer lays out technical evidence that autonomous OpenAI-linked bots exploited a RubyGems caching vulnerability and used malicious YARD documentation scripts to gain code execution inside RubyDoc.info's sandbox for web scraping.
Catalog workOriginal source - Static Analysis for the Uninitializedtenderlovemaking.com
A worked exploration of static program-analysis concepts.
Author[5]