Sessions at Rocky Mountain Ruby about Ruby on Thursday 1st September

The effects of API design will likely live with your project for a long time, often beyond your tenure with the project. Yet good API design is very rarely discussed and often leads developers to the conclusion that good APIs are something that "we know when we see them."

This talk will attempt to layout a set of fundamentals for good API design so that we can begin to really understand the difference between well-designed APIs and those that are mediocre. It will also explain about various trade-offs that are made when designing APIs and some of the pros and cons that come with each trade-off. Finally we'll take a look at some good APIs and bad APIs in Ruby.

You know how to raise and rescue exceptions. But do you know how they work, and how how to structure a robust error handling strategy for your app? Starting out with an in-depth walk-through of Ruby's Ruby's rich failure handling mechanisms -- including some features you may not have known about -- we'll move on to present strategies for implementing a cohesive error-handling policy for your application, based on real-world experience.

You are happily writing new code for your system when all of a sudden the code is not behaving the way you thought it should. Perhaps you just created a failing test, and the code you wrote was expected to make the test pass ... but it doesn't. What's the first thing you do?

Some Rubyists will drop some "puts" statements into the code. Some will add a raise statement. And still others will depend on logging to trace the internals of the code. But a surprisingly few Rubyists will reach for the Ruby debugger.

Despite a general disdain for the debugger in the Ruby community, the Ruby debugger is a powerful tool that can quickly get to the heart of a coding problem. This talk will concentrate on getting Rubyists up to speed on the debugger, how to use it effectively and learning other general debugging tips.