Site News #10: Systems Ruby, Self-Enrollment

Hi there graceful devs, here’s what’s new!

Content Updates

• Systems Ruby Course: The other day a Graceful.Dev member in my discord asked about spawning subprocesses in Ruby and I was like “oh, I think I have a whole series on that, let me find them for you”. Half an hour later, I came back with this systems ruby course. It’s all about interfacing with the operating system: controlling, monitoring, and communicating with subprocesses, allocating temp files, even calling out to system libraries.
• A Course About Project Automation, Chapter 25: In which we use a Rake automation as a “persistent notebook” to explore a REST API.

Pulling together the Systems Ruby course in a matter of minutes was the fruition of countless hours of labor over the past year, migrating the RubyTapas content library to an industrial-strength courseware platform. Graceful.Dev is now at a point I’ve been dreaming of for many years: at long last, pruning and gardening the archives (as well as new material) into guided learning paths is quick and painless. You can expect lots more extracted courses where that one came from. Suggestions for where to start are welcome!

Proliferating courses did pose one problem, however: up ’til now, the way Pro membership worked was that you would automatically be enrolled in all courses. That was never ideal, and it would have been increasingly unwieldy the more courses we added. Which brings me to…

Feature Updates

• Pro Members will no longer be auto-enrolled into courses. If you’re a Pro member, you can now self-enroll into any course they want.

You’ll remain enrolled in any courses you were enrolled in at the time of the change. I may run some cleanup sometime in the next few weeks, un-enrolling Pro members from courses they have 0% progress in. I think it would be both more useful to members and more meaningful for my own stats to narrow enrollment down to just the folks who are actually studying a given course. Of course, as a Pro member you’ll always be able to re-enroll into any courses you want to start.

This change involved some platform customization and there are probably edge cases I missed, so let me know if you run into any wonkiness. I’ll add the ability to self-unenroll soon. Until then you can always ask to be unenrolled if you want to de-clutter your “My Courses” view.

That’s it for now. Talk to you soon!