the Rubyist

Several years ago I started keeping track of Ruby coding conventions that my team and I were using in-house. The purpose was to document the most important guidelines we employ in order to keep our libraries and source code consistent, regardless the maintainer.

The result of this effort is the Rubyist, a collection of conventions and standards for Ruby programmers. The project is now open source, you can fork it and contribute.

the Rubyist Homepage

When I first started learning Ruby, several years ago, there was a very nice project called RubyGarden. This project was a real treasure for those learning Ruby because it was full of resources and information about the Ruby world. If you have been developing in Ruby for a long time, I'm sure you'll remember it.

But most of all, the RubyGarden has been extremely helpful to me (and many others) in learning about Ruby conventions and the most notable Ruby best practices. One page in particular, the RubyStyleGuide, was a collection of Ruby coding standard and naming conventions that every Ruby developer ought to have been familiar with.

RubyGarden Ruby Style Guide

A lot has changed since then.

The RubyGarden project was shut down a few years ago. As far I remember, the wiki was invaded by spam and the www.rubygarden.org domain has now been hijacked.

The Ruby language has evolved. Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 have introduced several new syntax changes and conventions. Moreover, the adoption of the Ruby programming language has increased over the years and several new common programming patterns have arisen.

GitHub was born. If you are in the habit of reading the source code, GitHub is like a chocolate factory for a child. You can find an countless number of Ruby projects, filter them, sort them and read the source code to learn from it. Just pick some random accounts owned by notable Ruby developers, explore their programming habits and learn new exciting best practices and patterns.

Even with these newly available resources, there are many times when an quick reference can come in most handy.

Whether you are a Ruby master or a newbie, I hope you'll find the Rubyist to be a source of inspiration.