I like to watch and listen

I have benefited greatly from listening in on the chatter of Rubyists on twitter and from connecting with my local Rails community. It’s been a fantastic way of tuning into what’s new and interesting, getting connected with the community, and beginning to understand the culture of Ruby and Rails. I recommend it whole heartedly to anyone starting out.

I’m not a heavy user of social networks – I am not a Facebook user and am moderately active on twitter. I think the main reason I am unhappy with social networks is their poor signal to noise ratio and can say that for the most part, the Rubyists I follow provide entertaining and useful information. It feels a little weird to be eavesdropping without the (explicit) knowledge of the primary participants in the conversation but this is, after all, a central tenet of virtual social networks!

Here are a few things that I did to plug into the Ruby community:

• I built a list of Rubyists and news sources by starting with @peterc and @defunkt and checking out their lists to see who they follow. I picked @peterc because I read his book and enjoyed it very much (see my previous post) and I think I got to @defunkt after finding him on youtube and checking out his work on Mustache and Sinatra and Github (he is a co-founder). At this point I’ve got a fairly stable list of my own going and on most days I come across something cool or something new that’s fun and helps keep things fresh and interesting.
• I found out who features in searches for local Rails consultancies and using them as a starting point for discovering local Rubyists. Should be useful to identify what’s on peoples’ minds locally and when they might be hiring.
• I located my local Ruby and Rails meetup. It’s affectionately called rorosyd – it meets every month at a nice pub and features talks that occasionally include the speaker bursting into song (MJ’s Thriller in one very amusing instance)! A lot of experienced members of the community attend and you also invariably find more than the occasional recruiter and tech curioso. Newcomers are required to introduce themselves and after the talks there is an opportunity to match available work with available people. I’ve attended three of these so far and am looking forward to the next one. Oh and there is a bit of beer drinking that goes on as well!

Satish Talim (mentioned also in the previous post) has a blog post on Rubyists to follow – this might also be useful to those starting out.