Dev Diary 2024-12-08

After some thinking and a long conversation with Mo and Kevin W, one of my projects for 2025 is starting up a mini-conference/meet-up called ‘Ruby Nonsense’. Essentially, the idea is to find joy in making silly things in Ruby, which is a language that seems uniquely suited to creating joy (or at least is fun to hack with).

I’ve been busier than I’d like with travel (again), which has cut into my writing time (again). I’ve got a few new ‘proper’ blog posts that need some minor cleanup, and I’ve started editing some older Cyberdelia recordings which, while a little out of date (such as the Ruby 3.1 episode), is part of getting that podcast back in action.

Cool Links

The Net Has Never Been Neutral

A thinking piece about how the protocols we use for the Internet aren’t nearly as neutral and open as we think. Even if you’re aware of the early history of the net, this is still a good read.

RubyConf 2023 - The Future of Understanding Ruby Code by Kevin Newton [YT]

This is a good intro to the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of the Prism parser introduced in Ruby 3.3

RubyConf 2022 - In Defense of Metaprogramming by Noel Rappin [YT]

Maybe the best technical definition of Ruby ‘magic’ that I’ve heard, which is ‘program behavior that is not specified via “normal” class and method creation’. It’s also nice to have a think about the role metaprogramming plays in Ruby, and how it gets used in practice. I used metaprogramming quite a bit in Bookworm, and a big part of how it manages to fit so much power in under 1k LOC is due to leveraging metaprogramming. That said, if one treats Ruby as a janky Python, that code would appear inscrutible.