Hello, DiR readers!

My team had an excellent time at RubyConf, the first one any of us had attended. With three of us there we were able to see most of the talks, but I still feel like I only scratched the surface. I’m looking forward to the 2016 conference in Cincinnati, where hopefully I’ll be able to engage in more of the hallway track than I did this year.

Presentations from RubyConf are starting to appear on Confreaks. Not all of my favorite talks are online, but here are a few:

The not-so-rational programmer

Laura Eck does a good job discussing the cognitive biases that can ruin a programming team. I think this one pairs well with Sandi Metz’s keynote about conformity and control at Keep Ruby Weird.

How to stop hating your test suite

Justin Searls tries to cram about 3-hours worth of talk into 40 minutes, so the pace can be a bit breathless. But the content is great, and the style is hilarious. If you want to spend more time with Justin and testing, I highly recommend his 4-video series on TDD; it’s a great summary of the testing style that I tend to favor, with excellent examples and explanations.

Inside Ruby’s VM

There is almost no way that anything in this talk will be of practical use to me, but Aaron Paterson is fun to watch, and learning more about the tokenize/parse/compile aspects of Ruby is interesting.

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My absolute favorite talks aren’t online yet, so expect links to those in the next newsletter.

However, more than all the talks and the socialization with other interesting programmers, the absolute best part of RubyConf for me was being able to say “Thanks!” to dozens of people. Over the course of 3 days I thanked:

• Each presenter
• The conference organizers and volunteers
• Yukihiro Matsumoto
• Avdi Grimm
• Mike Perham
• James Edward Gray
• Coraline Ada Ehmke
• A bunch of others!

No big productions, no fanboyism (well, mostly), just “Thanks”. I think simple recognition and appreciation are a valuable part of the Ruby community, and I was glad to tell people how much their work had helped me over the years.

Coming up soon on the website, more Rust! In a future newsletter I intend to talk about why I’ve spent so much time with Rust. I hope it has been interesting to people other than myself. But if not, at least there’s only one (or two) Rust posts left in this series. After I leave Rust-land, I have plans for a series of posts about Practicing Refactoring. I’m very excited about getting started on those.

Until next time, true receivers!

Ian

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