[amathew]

Regarding "I'm going to user group meetings".

I'm not a Ruby user, as I work primarily with statistical computing and machine learning, but Ruby has a really impressive set of regional user groups. Except for R, there aren't really any other languages which have a significant number of well organized regional user groups. It's great for users of a language to get together and share info and provide guidance to new users.

[yozhik]

The community is amazing. I've been to groups for other languages, but they aren't as hands on or useful as the Ruby meetings. The Ruby group in my area does monthly 'hack nights' where experienced rubyists pair up with noobs and implement a small project. That kind of interaction keeps me motivated and lets me pickup standard practices and tools much faster.