Rubyists love its Principle of Least Surprise, but Ruby can still be surprising -- not always in a good way.

This talk is about Ruby’s lurking “gotchas”, so that you can avoid being “gotten”. They range from basic differences from most other languages or common sense, to ones that often catch even expert Rubyists. You will come away with an awareness of specific things to watch out for, and a "Spidey-Sense" of some general kinds of things also likely to be dangerous.

This has been done before at some Washington DC area Meetups, but long ago (over a decade), and not yet at conferences.

You can see the old slides at https://bit.ly/RubyGotchas -- but my slide style has changed a lot, and I intend to reformat it into the illustrated story of a new Rubyist encountering many of these gotchas (there won't be time for all of them, and many have been fixed) one by one.

When I did it I only had a couple years of Ruby under my belt, but several longtime Rubyists told me there were things in it that they didn't know about!