Code serves two purposes: the first is to instruct the computer to do something, of course, but the second is to communicate your intentions with other programmers. The latter is too often neglected, whether out of a predilection for austerity, deadline-induced laziness, or simple misanthropy, and it detracts from the readability and maintainability of the principle instrument of value in our work as programmers.

This presentation will make a case for readability, and then suggest some ways of making Ruby code more communicative and maintainable by applying Robin Williams' CRAP visual design principles, along with some ideas borrowed from Spartan Programming, Michael Schwern, Marcel Molina, and Donald Knuth.

About Michael Granger
Michael Granger has been in love with Ruby since 2001, and has written a few libraries for it like BlueCloth, Linguistics, and MUES. He lives with a girl, seven parrots, two dogs, four cats, and two horses on a farm in Oregon. He works at LAIKA, a commercial animation company in Portland, where he hacks together lots of backend stuff for all the unglamorous sysadmin-ey parts of making movies and television commercials. He also dislikes writing about himself in the third person