My name is Barrie Callender and I originally wrote the Workpattern rubygem to learn Ruby and then how to write Ruby properly. I’m still working on that second part.

Workpattern is a rubygem that performs calculations using dates and durations down to a minute. It can be used to setup working and resting periods down to a minute. It can then calculate a date by adding or subtracting a duration from it, or calculate a duration by subtracting one date from another. Most busines day calculation library only allow for one week, but Workpattern allows you to set up a basic working weeks and then change individual days or weeks to show a two week holiday, a public holday or working a weekend.

The original Workpattern v0.0.1 was released on July 25, 2009. I am writing this on 21st February 2021 and the most recent 0.5.0 version was released on Octoner 19, 2016. However, I am about to release version 0.6.0 which has had a big rewrite to begin to untangle the mess it was in. It is faster and the code is now easier to read than it was. It still needs to improve before I begin to add features.

I hope to use this site to provide some examples of how one could use this rubygem, and along the way I hope to become better at programming Ruby. I also hope to learn more about Jekyll which this site runs on.

I’m also interested in learning the Elixir programming language and maybe develop the Workpattern library for it.

We’ll see.

Barrie Callender