Seven things I know after 25 years of development

On making the Ruby Changes, and some consequences of this work Every year since 2013, on December 25, a new Ruby version is released. (Before that, the version schedule was much unpredictable.) Every year since 2018 (Ruby 2.6), I spend several weeks in December working on updating my Ruby Changes site to prepare an annotated changelog of the...

On a new approach to implement that long-envied feature. In Elixir1, there is a pipeline operator that allows rewriting this code: a(b(c(d))) into this: d |> c() |> b() |> a() which helps to write code in clearly visible “pipelines” corresponding to the order in which data processing is happening. The concept is so captivating that many languages...

What Ruby’s top-level methods actually are, who they belong to and how they are namespaced. A few days ago, a curious question was asked on /r/ruby, which can be boiled down to this: How are the methods of the Kernel module available in the top-level scope? The question was dedicated to rand method, but (as the author correctly suggests) it also...

Some thoughts on how programming’s unlikely relations to poetry, and some implications of those relations I don’t have much time recently to work on articles about programming (especially considering my typical article length); but I have some previously written content to share. This article was drafted as a Twitter thread on my 39th birthday:...

A “stories-first” approach to refactor a small yet complicated piece of business code Recently, I didn’t have time or resource for serious writing. I had plans for several long articles for the summer that gone, but unfortunately not many have came of that. But last night I have stumbled upon famous (so it seems, though I have never seen it...