On Tue, Nov 20, 2007, Giles Bowkett wrote:
> Bit heretical but I'm kinda flagging on doing Rails day in and day
> out. Two questions if anybody's interested - What are people working
> on in Ruby that doesn't Rails? Or, what in Rails is interesting and
> exciting to more experienced programmers with perspective etc.?

I've been there.  I think most of the people who have been doing Rails
for longer than 6 months have been.  My solution was to start building
libraries for anything that interested me.

> So far the most interesting not-Rails Ruby projects I'm aware of are
> Rubinius, Shoes, RubyCocoa, and Adhearsion. Other cool stuff going on?
> Bonus points if the Web isn't even remotely involved. Huge bonus
> points if robots or psychedelic visuals are.

Amusingly, the first library I took on was OSX's Sync Services via
RubyCocoa ;)  I also joined up with a project that had a plist library
and worked on that a bit.

As for robots and psychedelia, check out RAD (another project that I
work on, though I don't own it), which is all about programming the
Arduino prototyping board from Ruby. rad.rubyforge.org.  You could
easily use it to control a robot, and there are plenty of people using
Arduinos to make visual art.

Back to non-me stuff, though, my best advice is to find a problem that's
interesting to you, that nobody else has tried yet (or that needs love)
and hack on it.  Rails often seems to behave as a gateway drug to get
you into the pure awesomeness of Ruby.

Ben