BRUG monthly meeting

Hey peeps, happy new year!

I hope you had a nice time during your holidays.

The BRUG format is likely to change a bit this year. We will only have talks every 2 months as it start to get tricky to find people volunteering for talks.

The other month will be a 'gentle' social night with drinks and food.

Luckily this month we again have the excellent Sam Phippen (https://twitter.com/samphippen) who is going to tell us why he is sick of discussing nil.

Please let me know if anyone is also willing to give a second talk.

I'm sick of discussing nil Rubyists love discussing how nil is evil. At this point I'm sure we all know the meaning is complected. Is the value missing? Is it a bug? Does it represent no value? Did we call a void function? Is it some default? So as it turns out those smug people with their type systems and referentially transparent data transformers have solved this problem, but do we have to switch to Haskell to reap the benefits? No.

Monadic maybe: it's a simple trick to remove the 'missing value' and 'no value' cases from the guesswork. It also means you return nil from fewer places. Without too much theory: let's look at building our own simple maybe library and some practical uses in applications, both rails and no, where monadic maybe can improve our software.