Taking a look at what all happened in 2018, and all the adventures we’ve been on.
Talks Given
All the conferences and meetups I’ve given talks at. Some of which are repeats of the same talk, though given that Reducing Enumerable took 200+ hours and Scaling Christmas took 50+ it’s a bit hard to get more unique talks to that level.
RubyConf — “Reducing Enumerable — An Illustrated Adventure” Program | RubyConf 2018 We’re ecstatic to bring this year’s RubyConf to sunny Los Angeles. Immerse yourself in the latest Ruby content along…rubyconf.org
Southeast Ruby — “Reducing Enumerable — An Illustrated Adventure” Southeast Ruby Conference | Nashville, TN | August 2-3 2018 Southeast Ruby is returning in 2018! We had so much fun last year that we decided to do it again. Join us August 2-3 in…2018.southeastruby.com
Let’s Sketch Tech — “Reducing Enumerable — An Illustrated Adventure” Let’s Sketch Tech! - Splash Let’s Sketch Tech is a 2-day, inclusive conference combining workshops and talks about drawing, sketching-noting and…letssketchtech.splashthat.com
Women Level Up — “Reducing Enumerable — An Illustrated Adventure” Reducing Ruby’s Enumerable & Humans Aren’t APIs Jennifer Tu, Founder at Cohere LLC, presents “Humans Aren’t APIs And Your Request Is 400 Denied”. Brandon Weaver…www.meetup.com
Modern Dot Web — “Scaling Christmas — An Illustrated Adventure” Modern Web December: JS Concurrency, Angular, npm, and scaling Christmas Tue, Dec 4, 2018, 6:30 PM: Come join us for our next Modern Web event co-hosted with Hosted at Shape Security with…www.meetup.com
WaffleJS — “Scaling Christmas — An Illustrated Adventure” WaffleJS A fun night of tech, waffles, and karaoke.wafflejs.com
(view at 1:29:00 or so)
Square Internal (5 talks)
Talks given internally at work, including Scaling Christmas and numerous talks on Ruby testing, internals, and other aspects. Some of which being confidential so a number is all we get here.
Articles Written
Now there are a lot of these, so we’ll break them into categories by content. If you would rather see them by difficulty, see this tweet:
On Meta and Mental Health
Posts covering meta-topics and addressing mental health issues The Developer Spectrum What started with a “Black Magic” Lemur I frequently dressed in a red starry wizard robe ended up expanding a bit after…medium.com Lemurs mean Hope I’ve had people ask me a number of times: “what’s with the lemurs?”. It’s a good question, and one I hope to answer…medium.com
On Functional Programming
Posts covering functional programming and how it can be applied in Ruby, either practically or purely esoterically because it was fun to write and implement. For want of Pattern Matching in Ruby — The Creation of Qo Qo is a Ruby gem made to emulate pattern matching and fluent querying found in other languages.medium.com Qo::Evil — Dynamic Compilation with eval One of the biggest arguments against Qo, and rightly so, was that most pattern matching is done in tight loops that get…medium.com On Dealing with Deep Hashes in Ruby — XF — Part One: Scopes Xf is a Ruby gem meant for transforming and searching deep hashes, inspired loosely by Lenses in Haskell.medium.com On Dealing with Deep Hashes in Ruby — XF — Part Two: Traces Xf is a Ruby gem meant for transforming and searching deep hashes, inspired loosely by Lenses in Haskell.medium.com Functional Programming in Ruby — State Ruby is, by nature, an Object Oriented language. It also takes a lot of hints from Functional languages like Lisp.medium.com Functional Programming in Ruby — Closures One of the most powerful features of Functional Programming that we can leverage in Ruby is the concept of a Closure.medium.com Functional Programming in Ruby — Flow Control Flow control in Functional Programming is an idea that is a bit harder to wrap your head around as a primarily Object…medium.com Understanding Transducers in Ruby This article is a translation of the article “Understanding Transducers in Javascript”, with permission granted by the…medium.com
On “Reducing Enumerable”
Posts related to the creation of Reducing Enumerable, my major talk of the year, as well as a text version of it containing the same images and some expanded storylines for extra fun. Creating “Reducing Enumerable — An Illustrated Adventure” How I created and illustrated my conference talk for Southeast Ruby 2018.medium.com Reducing Enumerable — Part One: The Journey Begins The first part of the Reducing Enumerable story, where Red begins his journey of knowledge.medium.com Reducing Enumerable — Part Two: Chartreuse, Master of Map This brings us to part two of Reducing Enumerable where we meet Chartreuse, the master of Map.medium.com Reducing Enumerable — Part Three: Indigo, Master of Select This brings us to part three of Reducing Enumerable where we meet Indigo, the master of Select.medium.com Reducing Enumerable — Part Four: Violet, Master of Find This brings us to part three of Reducing Enumerable where we meet Indigo, the master of Select.medium.com Reducing Enumerable — Part Five: Cerulean, Master of Tally By This brings us to part five of Reducing Enumerable where we meet Cerulean, the soon to be master of Tally By.medium.com Reducing Enumerable — Part Six: A Final Lesson from Scarlet This brings us to part six of Reducing Enumerable where we return to Scarlet for Red’s final lesson.medium.com
On “Let’s Read” and other recap series
Posts recapping material I’ve read or attended. I intend to keep these series going, but other matters (namely vacation) stalled me until after the 2019 line had been crossed. Let’s Read! — Eloquent Ruby (Ch 1) Perhaps my personal favorite recommendation for learning to program Ruby like a Rubyist, Eloquent Ruby is a book I…medium.com Let’s Read! — Eloquent Ruby (Ch 2) This series will focus on reading over Eloquent Ruby, noting things that may have changed or been updated since 2011…medium.com RubyConf Rundown Pt. 1 Wherein we take a look at some of my personal favorite talks of the conference. This will be part one of a few posts…medium.com
On Advanced Ruby
Topics addressing more advanced Ruby tips and tricks, some of which being truly evil and heretical in nature. In other words, a great deal of fun but very bad for production code in some cases. Destructuring in Ruby What if I told you destructuring in method calls was possible in Ruby? Join me in my exploration in destructuring!medium.com Mf — Abusing Ruby’s Operator Precedence You may have seen Ruby 2.6’s Proc composition, but did you know there are more operators you can abuse using Ruby’s…medium.com Sf — Abusing Operators and Method Missing Now if you thought Mf was bad, that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Sf is oh so much worse, and that’s what…medium.com
On Ruby 2.6
Posts covering (at that point) upcoming features in Ruby 2.6+ Exploring Ruby 2.6 — Enumerator, Hash, and Enumerable Changes As we get closer to Christmas we’re going to be seeing more and more features for Ruby 2.6. Some of them haven’t had…medium.com Exploring Ruby 2.6 — Proc#compose and Enumerator#chain New features abound in Ruby 2.6. This time around we have two fun new items for Ruby 2.6 to look into: Proc#compose and…medium.com
On Operations
Posts covering Operations work, including another fun illustrated adventure story post. Scaling Christmas — An Illustrated Adventure The lemurs are back! This time they’ve come for a special Christmas-themed adventure about how Christmas scales, using…medium.com On On-Call, Operations, and Holidays Operations can be challenging, especially around the holidays. Recently there’s been a lot of talk around on-call, so…medium.com
On Miscellaneous Topics
Anything that didn’t particularly fit another topic. Tak — Sequencing Movesets in JS One of my more favorite pastimes over the last few years has been Tak, from the folks over at Cheapass Games and Elodin…medium.com Challenge — Table of Contents Generator Introducing developer challenges! This is a new series where we post challenges inspired by real world applications.medium.com I want to paste in Pry! If you’ve used Pry before, you know that pasting things into it may not quite work as expected with long segments of…medium.com
Most Popular Tweet
It turns out that turning Yukihiro Matsumoto into Santa is very popular, a fun joke that all started with Eric Weinstein implying certain similarities:
Favorite Lemur
So off of polling various individuals, it looks like the most popular lemur so far this year is….
Chartreuse!
Next year you’ll be meeting her sister, Jade, a creation of a certain younger brother of mine. Now what adventures will those two be up to?
Only time will tell.
Keeping Count
So that brings us to the final numbers of 2018:
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30 articles written
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12 talks given
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Hundreds of hours of lemur drawings
What’s Next?
Oh there are some truly major projects I have coming up, some of which I haven’t been mentioning quite yet. You’ll see in due time.
My hope this year is to speak at more conferences, including ones potentially outside of Ruby, and continue to spread stories and whimsy across the developer world.
I already have several ideas for new articles and other tutorials, but I want to know: what is it that you want to learn next? Who knows, I may start writing more on it.
2018 was fun, we’ll see what 2019 brings.