Introducing The Dynamic Rubyist
Hi. If you have no idea why you are receiving this email, it's because at some time in the past you signed up for Noel Rappin's email newsletter.
Surprise! It's back.
You may have forgotten about it, since I've produced exactly one newsletter in the last 20 months.
This is a short message to tell you (or warn you) that more newsletters will be coming, and there will be a name change, and also, "hi", I'm glad you are out there and I've missed writing these things.
A funny thing about the logistics of writing a newsletter that has been coming out so intermittently is that I get subscriptions (occasionally) when I'm not writing, but when I do put out a new post, that's when I get unsubscriptions, presumably from people who are surprised by the content or the newsletter's existence or something.
So, this is a heads-up to give you a chance to stick around or not. I hope you do.
Why I've Produced Exactly One Newsletter in the Last 20 Months...
It's the book.
Programming Ruby 3.2 is available in beta, the current beta is the production-ready version of the book, meaning that it is complete, and has gone through technical review and that my work is mostly done. It's missing a copyedit, most of the index, and a final layout pass to make sure that, for example, code examples don't get broken up between pages and such. I should be getting the copyedit and index shortly, and the final book should be available in ebook form and print form by the end of November. (We may adjust the title to take Ruby 3.3 into account.)
The final book comes in at about 650 pages, give or take, and even with it not being from scratch, it's still a lot. For most of the past 18 months any time I even thought about writing something newsletter-shaped, my brain would stop and ask my why I wasn't working on the Pickaxe book.
You can buy the ebook directly from Pragmatic and the physical book is available for pre-order from Amazon.
The book has been very fun to work on, I'm quite happy with it, and you should buy it no matter what your level of Ruby experience, but that'll be another post for another day (see here for a post that might answer your questions).
Now What?
So, before I signed the pickaxe book, I had a pretty good run of doing about two posts a month for about 18 months. My goal was three posts a month, but still...
That was fun, and I'd to start doing it again, but I've come to the conclusion that the existing name, "Locally Sourced", is a joke that doesn't land (it's meant to be a play on "localhost" and locally sourced food).
The new name is "The Dynamic Rubyist", the focus is Ruby as a dynamic language, not just in language syntax, but also in typing and style, and in how to get the most out of dynamic typing and dynamic tooling, and in the kinds of designs that make Ruby most effective.
The posts will still be a mix of code-heavy and more essay-style. It won't honestly be that different than before, but I think the name fits better.
I'm going to start with an ongoing series: "Better Know A Ruby Thing", where I talk about a specific Ruby syntax or library feature, generally ones that touch on Ruby's dynamic nature, and talk about how best to use the thing and then as a touchpoint to talk about anything related or interesting that comes to mind. The first one will be method_missing, later ones will include scope resolution, symbol to proc, define_method, monkey patching, prepend, and who knows what all.
If you are new to this newsletter, here are five previous posts that are similar to what you are likely to see going forward -- most of the time, newsletter articles are crossposted to noelrappin.com, purely administrative ones like this sometimes aren't:
One Other Thing
I'm going to be turning on the option for paid subscriptions. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is that I want to be able to use more advanced Buttondown features and I want that to be roughly break even.
This is tricky, because I'm not sure what the subscription benefits are going to be, beyond "making sure I keep writing this". If we do get a small critical mass of subscribers, I'll add some subscriber features.
I'm going to start out at $3.00 a month or $30 a year.
If I've done this right, which I'm a little dubious of, this is a link for the monthly subscription:
And this is a link for the annual subscription.
Break-even for that given Buttondown's pricing is about a dozen subscribers, which, honestly, I struggled to get the last time I tried this. Somehow the "give me money for no benefits" tag line wasn't marketing gold. If this does go beyond break-even, then I'll add some subscription benefits as well.
Thanks, I'm glad you're here, and I think the new content will start in a few days with "Better Know A Ruby Thing: method_missing"
Dynamic Ruby is brought to you by Noel Rappin.
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