I love that feeling when a new concept starts to come together in your mind and you can point to all the converging sources of insight. Right now, I can’t tell if I’m fooling myself, hiding some logic, or making my code more readable with this particular concept, but when I put together these three pieces of information, I think I start to see something emerge. I’ve been inspired to do some more digging into these kinds of questions lately thanks to the awesome new Ruby Book Club Podcast.

It’s 6:23 on Sunday morning, day 2 at Burlington Ruby, so I thought I’d take a few minutes and recap some of what I saw and learned yesterday. Everyone keeps talking about what an amazing community we have in the Ruby world and I guess I’m spoiled since I don’t have any other software communities to compare it to, but I can tell you that every talk has been thoughtful, curious, and in different ways caring: caring about the future of the language, caring about other people’s growth and development, and caring even about novel, smarter, and more refined approaches to getting things done.