Site News #13: Courses in Full Bloom

Hi there graceful devs,

Boy I’ve been waiting (and working) a long time to be able to announce today’s news: every single topic in the Graceful.Dev catalog—all ten years of material—is now organized into “Garden Path” courses. No more slogging through entire Tapastry (unless you want to!); no more searching for topics on testing or refactoring or growing your developer career. Now you can find the Garden Path on the theme you’re interested in and follow it. Each Garden Path has a new introduction, and each is further broken down into cohesive modules.

Not content to organize all the content into garden paths, I’ve also collected the paths into Garden Tours. If you’re not sure where to start, or what order to take the courses in, the Garden Tours page can guide you!

Yes, the site is in full riotous summer bloom, now boasting 36 courses in total. And to celebrate, we’re updating the sites style and branding a tiny bit. Up til now, it’s been kind of a toss-up whether we were going for more of a dancing motif (plus jellyfish; I mean, they kind of dance, right?) or a garden theme. But after a Spring spent raising my own real-world vegetable garden while tending to this virtual garden of courses, the right choice seemed pretty obvious. As you might notice in the updated site logo, we’re going all-in on the floral/garden theme.

I just want to take a moment here and say “thank you” to everyone who has supported the site by becoming a Pro member, and a special big thanks to everyone who has come along for the ride through the RubyTapas-to-Graceful.Dev transition. Today’s announcement represents months of reviewing and categorizing and organizing material day-in and day-out. But in a larger sense it’s the payoff of something I’ve spent years working towards: a platform that could make this kind of massive content re-org tractable in the first place. Thank you for believing in and supporting this botanical garden of coding know-how. I’m so glad I can finally deliver the kind of learning experience I’ve been dreaming of for years.

And of course, like any true garden, these courses will continue to be tended. Please don’t hesitate to give feedback on the organization, the order of topics, holes in the courses you wish would be filled with new content, broken links, etc! Graceful.Dev is a community garden, and it’s better for everyone’s input.

Stay graceful,

— Avdi