Reducing Enumerable

Hey, welcome to the notes repository for my talk, Reducing Enumerable!

RubyConf Talk Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3b9KlzjJNM
Keynote Slides: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qtGmqZuWtktIWs1WDaHGNGiAkgy1R4Xb
PDF Slides: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1utrizgZTKdfW1gSZShMWgjjbE4LAzlNL

Novel Format

I've broken this story down into various Medium posts to make it easier to read without needing full access to the slides. I've also adjusted and added a bit to the prose in certain places to round it out and make it into more of a story. Each segment is a 4 to 8 minute read.

What's in this repo?

In this repo you'll find some basic code examples from the talk and their associated specs. In the case of transducers, that's a bit more complicated and will be covered in the "Read More" section below.

Where did this idea start?

From a few things.

This has been a long time interview question of mine, which was to reimplement Enumerable methods. I'd noticed that the first two or three methods would go well enough, but people would always struggle with the idea of reduce.

Because of that I took to writing about the concept and teaching people how to use it, as it's an incredibly powerful and useful tool to have in one's programming toolbelt.

This led to the original article the talk is based on:

https://medium.com/@baweaver/reducing-enumerable-the-basics-fa042ce6806

Now this is a series of articles, and does not have illustrations.

What went into this?

200+ hours of work, 50+ distinct illustrations, and 140 slides.

I had written an article about the version of this talk delivered at Southeast Ruby in August:

https://medium.com/@baweaver/creating-reducing-enumerable-an-illustrated-adventure-c6adfcc30d5b

Note that since then I've redrawn most if not all of the significant slides in the talk, adding about 20 more illustrations on top of the original work done and several hours. That's the problem with being an artist, you always want to redo everything once you get better at a style.

The talk was completely hand-illustrated by me using pencil, paper, an iPad Pro 12.9" with Apple Pencil, Illustrator Draw, and Keynote.

Why Lemurs?

The longer version

CW: Mental health

https://medium.com/@baweaver/lemurs-mean-hope-ae5d01f95700

The shorter version

Why not?

On a more serious note, I believe this started with early visits to the zoo as a child. After a while I had somehow hassled my parents into getting me a stuffed lemur, and I've kept it ever since. It lives on my desk back at home right next to my art supplies.

Now as to how that stuck, there was this great need to have an awesome and unique alias online. I'd tried everything I could think of, until I saw aforementioned stuffed lemur out of the corner of my eye in Junior High.

I decided right then that I would be known as "lemur", though the original alias was "GoldenLemur" as I wanted to be awesome like a certain flash cartoonist, "LegendaryFrog".

This later morphed into "keystonelemur", as is my twitter handle, from a love for Colorado and skiing in the area.

As to why now, and why illustrated lemur cartoons and Ruby, well that was all thanks to a certain lucky stiff. My first Ruby book was Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby, and as you can tell it left a bit of an impression.

The lemurs make an excellent learning device to add levity to an otherwise dense and hard to explain set of concepts, and are more accessible to people who would otherwise not be interested in programming.

I love Ruby, Lemurs, and teaching, so here we are brave reader.

I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoy making them.

baweaver / reducing_enumerable Goto Github PK