Many developers have heard of “monads” over the last few years. Besides asking “what is a monad?”, many of these developers have asked, “Why should I care?” The fact that monads are associated with esoteric, hard-to-understand languages (such as Haskell) only makes it less likely that we’ll learn about them. In this talk, Tom Stuart introduces the idea of Monads using Ruby, and then talks about how to use them to improve our Ruby code. Slides for a version of this talk are available here.