A handy dandy autoload / require / load helper for your rubies. Similar to using[1], but with a few differences of opinion, and a bit shorter. Basically, expand path is fine, up until a point. Sometimes there's no point (i.e. when the load path already contains most of the path you're trying to open). When you're writing libs that users might require sub parts with 'libname/sub_part', then expand_path combined with say, rubygems, can lead to double requires. Lets not do that. :-) [1] http://github.com/smtlaissezfaire/using/