I’ve been getting into Ruby & other software engineering talks lately, as they complement my usual diet of quantum physics, neuroscience, and social psychology lectures. I’m not actually that smart, a lot of it goes over my head, but sometimes I get concepts and other times they prompt me to poke through Wolfram Alpha, Wikipedia, etc.
Anyway, Technical Talks:
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Here Be Dragons: Katrina Owen.
Starts off with some fun ranting about some bad code, then gets real. Fantastic.
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Sometimes a Controller is Just a Controller: Justin Searls.
How people on dev teams interact, and how to maintain sanity.
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API Design for Gem Authors: Emily Stolfo.
How to design your Ruby gem so people will actually want to use it.
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Don’t Be a Hero: Sustainable Open Source: Lillie Chilen.
How to make sure your open source project doesn’t die, and actually get other people to contribute.
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Estimation Blackjack and Other Games: A Comedic Compendium: Amy Unger.
Why estimation is important and how it goes wrong.
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Introduction to Introspection Features of Ruby: Koichi Sasada.
Gets into some of the low-level capabilities the Ruby engine gives you. I thought I knew a lot about Kernel and Object methods, but this taught me otherwise.
I guess most of these are “soft talks” in that they aren’t about some new library or specific functions of programming. But these topics are critical to working on a team. Even if you know some or all the material, it’s worth a refresher course now and again.