In my opinion one of the best Ruby talks of 2014 is "Refactoring Ruby with Monads"[0] by Tom Stuart held at Barcelona Ruby Conference.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1jYlPtkrqQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1jYlPtkrqQ</a>
Here's my list of (mostly) Ruby-related good talks from this year:<p><a href="http://thomasleecopeland.com/2014/10/18/good-technical-videos.html" rel="nofollow">http://thomasleecopeland.com/2014/10/18/good-technical-video...</a><p>Andrew Turley's "What we can learn from COBOL" talk is probably my favorite.
I'll put a humble plug in for my talk "Care and Feeding of your Junior Developer" from Nickel City Ruby. It was on top of Confreaks for a few weeks and people seemed to like it, so if you are a junior, or you mentor juniors, check it out.<p><a href="http://confreaks.com/videos/4659-nickelcityruby2014-how-to-be-an-awesome-junior-developer-and-why-to-hire-them" rel="nofollow">http://confreaks.com/videos/4659-nickelcityruby2014-how-to-b...</a>
That this list got upvoted to the top spot must be some sign that the HN audience is still enthused about Ruby-related stories (I say that has a Ruby fan myself)...It's a good list and I'll bookmark all of its items, but it is pretty brief, both in items (5) and in the summarization (and the use of the overexcited cliché "killer" in the original title makes me extra curmudgeonly about it).<p>Or are people really enthused about talks as a way to learn things? I haven't been to a talk in awhile and I just can't get into video learning. So FWIW, I'll throw in the Ruby-related-infothing that I was most excited about this year: the publishing of "Metaprogramming Ruby 2:" (<a href="https://pragprog.com/book/ppmetr2/metaprogramming-ruby-2" rel="nofollow">https://pragprog.com/book/ppmetr2/metaprogramming-ruby-2</a>)...The original version was one of the most helpful books to me as a Ruby beginner in 2010, both in learning the language and learning new ways to think about programming.
Wow, sandi's talk was really interesting. She's working on a rails book so i'll be interested to see her approach to rails.<p>I'm pretty good with "small methods" but her refactor from that to "small objects", while more flexible, seems like its more complicated in the end. I mean if you're going to have a lot of those it makes sense, but I feel like it could equally be called premature; but I respect that it is more tolerant to future unknown changes. "small methods" is also easier for a junior developer to support, and i think that should be taken into consideration.
It's interesting to note just how applicable these talks are to other languages. That database one is something i'd recommend a high schooler listen to for their next hackathon.