I am on the train to Boston from Providence and glad I spent the past few days at RubyConf Mini. Today we learned about peephole optimizations in compilers, functional programming in Ruby, and class macros. While I did not fully grok all the technical presentations, I enjoyed seeing aspects of Ruby that I have not explored.

Teaching Ruby to Count

The most practical presentation was about Teaching Ruby to Count. Joël from Thoughtbot showed us how to create custom objects that work with the ranges and iterations by implementing an each method and including the Enumerable module. By understanding how other Ruby objects implement this behavior, you can now create your own objects that work the way most Rubyists expect.

Code Complexity is the Demon Everyone is Fighting

Battling code complexity is such an awful problem that I attended a second session on it. The tips were similar to the first presentation:

• Use RubyCritic to identify candidates for refactoring.
• Use flog to measure complexity as you code.
  • Conditional statements and DRY code are often complexity culprits. Sometimes you need to re-hydrate your code.
• Files with high churn but low complexity are probably just data you can put into a database or data file.

A Standing Ovation

Rose Wiegley, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Shopfiy, received a standing ovation for her closing keynote. She brought us through the history of software engineering, the decline of women being involved in the field, and challenged us to be leaders. I learned that the difference between a Senior Engineer and a Staff Engineer is the Senior Engineer solves problems and the Staff Engineer discovers problems. Her presentation did a great job of leading by example, giving advice and showing us how she implemented that advice in her own organization.