Having trouble keeping up with the state of Ruby? Dynamic language police keep catching you ridin’ dirty? Here are some top-secret resources I use to stay 2.0 steps ahead.

they see me bloggin…

Ruby has more than a few celebrity blogs. But there are many smaller precious stones in the ether. Some more obscure ones:

• Taw
• Mentalguy
• Myles Byrnes
• Giant Robots
• Kent Sibilev

You can read all my feeds tagged with Ruby in your browser, or you can snag my ruby.opml file.

Technorati lets me see what other blogs are saying about my own projects. It seems not to search non-English blogs though.

aggregators

Rubylicious, my favorite, is a curated Ruby feed aggregator. Quality is consistently very high. Rubycorner is its harder-hitting uncurated cousin from the streets.

The Rubyforge news feed is critical for finding out about new or active Ruby libraries. I usually just click through to the project home, since the news entry itself assumes I’m already familiar with the project, which I’m not.

delicious diving and pastie stalking

Watching the del.icio.us tags flow by is a good time: ruby, ruby+camping, rails. Less common tag combinations can get you more interesting results, such as ruby+dylan, or ruby+machinelearning. Also, I add people whose work I appreciate to my delicious network.

You can find odd things in the pastebins, too. Bigbold has more fleshed-out snippets, while Pastie is more random.

mailing lists and irc

I don’t really hang out on the mailing lists, but for those who do, Ruby Forum is the easiest to use gateway (better than Google Groups).

I am on IRC all the time, but tend to avoid the standard Ruby channels. They can still be great resources, though, especially for beginners. Hacking out a proof-of-concept live in an eval bot is an excellent way to learn syntax tricks from other Rubyists.

across the sea

And then there are the Japanese. I really wish a Japanese speaker would start a “this week in Japan” series that gave English summaries of interesting posts. My German is not so useful against kyōtsūgo.

Excite, however, has a Japanese-to-English translator which is sometimes acceptable. It’s better than Google’s, at least.

You want the form to look like this:

As a start, here’s Rubyist Magazine in English.

postscript

This the Play-N-Skillz when we out and cruisin

Got certs in every language except Dylan

But I’m still ain’t losin’.