This session will highlight some of the most fundamental and timeless best practices described in Kent Beck’s book “SmallTalk Best Practice Patterns†in the context of Ruby development. The Ruby community has fostered a great pioneering spirit at its core. Rubyists eagerly investigate new tools, approaches and programming techniques to unleash Ruby’s full power and expressiveness. Sometimes however, this pioneering spirit often comes at the expense of learning from previous collective knowledge in the developer community. We do not have to rediscover all classic edge wisdom on our own. There is much to learn from best practices documented by the Smalltalk community which had a very similar dynamic to our own, and which attracted the best programmers of their generation: “I always knew that one day Smalltalk would replace Java. I just didn’t know it would be called Ruby.†– Kent Beck
