First off, I’d like to congratulate Working with Rails on their 1st birthday! With the size of their community, I can’t believe they are only a year old. If you’re using Ruby on Rails and haven’t joined yet, you should go check it out.
What some people don’t know is that Working with Rails is not just a site of Rails developer profiles. Well, it is primarily that, and the site helps hiring companies and job-hunting Rails developers find each other. This has been made more explicit by their new Job Board. But more than that, they have a few other things to offer.
One thing I find really helpful is the way you can browse the top Ruby gems and Rails plugins. The list is ordered by usage of the entire community or weighted by authority. You could even take a look at the gems and plugins used by a particular developer (here are my gems and plugins). It’s a shame that currently this info is not available for the very top Rails developers (because a gem is needed to install and run to gather the data). Read more about this in “What’s in your toolbox?”.
Then there’s the Hackfests, or monthly contests where the top contributors to the Ruby on Rails source code are rewarded. If you’re a Rails developer from a third world country and find that O’Reilly books are a bit over your budget, you might want to join the contest and get about 4 patches applied to the source code within a month.
There’s also the Rails BlogSphere where you can be updated with the latest blog posts by your favourite Rails developers. I haven’t really used this much because I think I have subscribed to enough Rails blogs already.
The site also has a forum for discussing anything about Rails, but I don’t really recommend it, or at least not yet. The forum activity is quite low. If you need help with your Rails project, I think you may be better off asking in the official mailing lists of Rails or of your local Rails community.
Working with Rails has grown a lot in just a year in both the size of the community and site features. I hope they grow even more in their 2nd year.
