The video of my Mountain West Ruby Conference talk, Affordances in Programming Languages, is now up on Confreaks. I hope you enjoy it!

I’ve always been fascinated with the way conditionals are implemented in Smalltalk. Rather than having built-in if/then/else keywords, Smalltalk uses polymorphism. The Boolean subclasses True and False simply implement #ifTrue:, #ifFalse:, #ifTrue:ifFalse:, #and:, #or:, etc. appropriately for themselves. This is a brilliant design, and understanding it got me closer to really understanding Smalltalk.

This post is part of a periodic series about The Tools I Use.

Next month will mark 13 years at my current job. I’ve had the same manager for all of those years and three of my teammates have been there as long or longer than I have. But there have been changes, too. In my time, there have been four different CEOs and at least five different directors and/or VPs of R&D (my department).

[This is not an April Fool’s joke. I always publish my posts on Tuesday mornings, and this week’s just happens to be a release announcement. I considered delaying for a day, but in the end, decided to keep up my regular posting schedule.]

Last week, I had the wonderful opportunity of speaking at Mountain West Ruby Conference 2014. I spoke on Affordances in Programming Languages.

Where I work, we use Rake as our main build tool.

I recently wrote about what originally drew me to Ruby.

This post is part of a periodic series about The Tools I Use.

This past week, the Ruby community has been mourning the loss of Jim Weirich. I never had the pleasure of meeting Jim, but did attend one of his talks. I also learned from some of the materials he generously shared with the world. I interacted with him a bit on a couple of Rake pull requests. And I was incredibly humbled and honored that he commented on a few of my posts here.