Site News #12: Course-Splosion!

Hiya graceful devs! I know it’s been a while since I’ve written an update. This isn’t because there’s nothing new on the site. It’s actually because I’ve been deep in one of the most ambitious content improvements in the combined history of RubyTapas and Graceful.Dev!

So, as you know if you’ve been a member for a while, Graceful.Dev’s content is dominated by the nearly decade-long run of RubyTapas episodes now found in The Tapastry, spanning over 650 topics. Because I’ve always leaned towards covering subjects with perennial value, 99% of that material is still relevant to anyone using Ruby for work or play. But for someone who wasn’t following RubyTapas from the beginning, it’s a bit much to wade through. Breaking that material out into approachable, cohesive courses has always been a goal. Courses like Master the Object-Oriented Mindset in Ruby and Rails and Flawless Ruby were early proofs-of-concept.

Now that the technical underpinnings of Graceful.Dev are stable, the stage is set for course-ification on a large scale. And I’ve set myself the somewhat ambitious goal of having every single RubyTapas episode organized into topical courses by my birthday, July 5.

More and more I think of this site as a “garden of content”, much like my beloved Missouri Botanical Gardens, only with short videos and transcripts instead of daffodils. In keeping with that theme (which you’ll soon be seeing reflected more in the site branding), I’m calling these courses “garden paths“. Rather than being traditional planned courses, these are suggested pathways through the site’s content.

I’m well on the way already! You might have seen the signs if you’ve scanned the course list lately. New to the site are:

• Rigorous Ruby: all about testing Ruby code, the philosophy of testing, TDD/BDD, RSpec, and mock/stub objects.
• Crystaline Ruby: a follow-on to Flawless Ruby for deepening your handiness with Ruby’s core object types.
• Scintillating Ruby: another advanced Ruby fluency path, this one focused on Ruby syntax and semantics.
• Collected Ruby: a path through many and varied topics relating to Ruby’s collection classes: Arrays, Hashes, Enumerators, etc.
• Strung Ruby: all about strings, searching, parsing, and regular expressions.
• Async Ruby: a deep dive into threads and other concurrency mechanisms.
• Refined Ruby: the next level up from Crystaline Ruby and Scintillating Ruby, this path builds on your Ruby fluency to help guide your choices about how to express yourself clearly in code, how to organize your methods and classes, and how to safely evolve your designs with refactorings.
• Domain Modeling in Ruby: a collection of topics on how to represent business domains in objects, options for persisting those objects to database management systems, and how to connect domain object models to the outside world.

In combination with the garden paths already created, like Systems Ruby, that brings us to around half of the Tapastry topics organized into courses. Each course has a new introduction, and each is internally is broken down into 2-7 modules, each with a few paragraphs of introduction.

I hope to have the rest of the episode history organized in the next few weeks!

So, that’s what I’ve been up to on the site. I hope you’ll take a wander down the new garden paths, and let me know what you think and if you see anything out-of-place.

Stay graceful,

Avdi