POODNYC 2015 Scholarships have been awarded

Scholarships for the Oct 19-21 Practical Object-Oriented Design Course (POODNYC) in New York City have been awarded!  Winners are listed below, but before I introduce them I'd like to give an overview of the applicant pool and selection process.

Posted on August 26, 2015 .

Suspicions of nil

I'm feeling suspicious of nil.

What is nil?


In a recent newsletter I pondered true and false, and suggested that thinking of them as normal, everyday objects could expand your ideas about OOP. Today I'll continue with this theme by considering nil.

 What _is_ nil?

A straightforward, very concrete definition might be that it's an instance of NilClass and a specialized kind of Ruby singleton that responds to 70+ public/protected methods.

Let's have a look...

Posted on December 22, 2014 .

POODNC Scholarships Have Been Awarded

Scholarships for the Oct 29-31 Practical Object-Oriented Design Course (POODNC) in Durham, NC have been awarded! Winners are listed below, but before I introduce them I'd like to give an overview of the applicant pool and  selection process.

I'll be awarding scholarships for future public classes and hope that transparency about how this works will motivate you to talk some deserving person into applying, or to apply for your own deserving self.

The POODNC Scholarship

The scholarship includes a seat in the POODNC course
  (courtesy of me), and airfare and lodging (courtesy of Hashrocket, to whom I am very grateful). As you can see, it's a full ride. The intent was to remove every financial barrier that would prevent the recipient from attending.

Posted on September 15, 2014 .