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