RubyTapas March Update

The RubyTapas kitchen has been bustling over the last few months! It’s hard to know where to begin.

Let’s start with…

New Tasting Menu: Designing with Objects

Object-oriented design is one of those skills that can be explained in a few sentences, but which can take years to master. A lot of RubyTapas episodes over the years have dealt with how to think about software problems from an OO mindset. For the first time, I’ve gathered the most essential episodes on OO thinking, given them a sensible order, and added new introductions to tie the whole course together.

The Designing with Objects tasting menu is available now to any members with a Ravenous or non-legacy Team account.

New Feast: Compendious Thunks Series 1

If you’ve watched the first four episodes of 2017, in which guest chef Chris Strom brought us some of his videos on software design patterns, you know how fun and practical his lessons are. I mentioned this in episode #465, but I want to reiterate it now: as part of my collaboration with Chris, we’re making the full Compendious Thunks Series 1 course available to Ravenous members.

This course also inaugurates a new RubyTapas site section: Feasts. Where Tasting Menus are curated collections of past RubyTapas episodes, Feasts are original, full-length courses on a specific topic. Feasts are available at no extra cost to Ravenous members.

New Site Features

  • We’ve continued to update both new and old episodes with copious links to related episodes and external resources. If you usually just watch the videos and haven’t browsed the scripts on the site recently, you might want to check them out! For an example, try out Episode #468: Line Endings.
  • We’ve relaxed the session timeouts, so you should be able to stay logged-in a lot longer now.
  • There’s a new (experimental) video downloads list. This is intended to make it easier for Ravenous members to download many episodes at once. This should help you stock up for long plane rides! Note: this page gradually makes more seasons available the longer you’re a member, on a month-by-month basis.

What’s in the Oven

Coming up in the next month:

  • Some guidelines on making your Ruby code safely cross-platform compatible.
  • A pair of episodes on the not-always-obvious decision of when to model a concept as a Value Object, and when to model it as an Entity (an object with a distinct identity).
  • For the first time in a RubyTapas episode, some footage I shot OUTSIDE of the computer screen!

I’m sure there was more news to report, but that’s all I can remember for now. Bon appétit, and happy hacking!

— Avdi