Writing small classes is hard. You know you should, but how? It's so much easier to write a large class. In this talk we'll build up a set of small classes starting from nothing using a set of directed refactorings applied as we build, all while keeping our tests green. We'll identify abstractions yearning to be free of their big class cages. In the process we'll also see how basic patterns such as composition, delegation and dependency inversion emerge from using small objects.

Mark Menard is president of Enable Labs, a consulting firm, in Troy, NY specializing in large scale web and mobile app dev. Mark talks about Ruby and coding at conferences and user groups. Mark also gets his hands dirty doing construction work from time-to-time, and is a happy husband and father.