About #ruby-pro

The #ruby-pro channel is a forum for experienced ruby developers to meet and discuss topics that go beyond the basics. It is permanently moderated (meaning only voiced users can write to the channel) to ensure a high quality experience. Having the channel moderated also avoids it being a walled of secret garden that the lesser experienced beneath us can't have insight in. This way they can join the channel profit from the available knowledge passively.

Another feature of #ruby-pro is the occasional gatherings where even normally unvoiced users can host a topic. Gatherings are a great way to improve your knowledge and skill in a short time.

If you feel ready to participate, there are various ways to gain the voice status which is required to talk in #ruby-pro. For one if you hosted a gathering-topic, you will get voice. If you stand out in #ruby-lang, helping others it is also likely that you get invited (otherwise try and ask a member). And the last but not least way to get voice is by another voiced user vouching for you. Take a look at the rules for gaining voice.

Aims

With #ruby-pro I want to:

Provide a place for undisturbed discussion of advanced ruby topics

The channel is permanently moderated (only users with voice) permanently. This makes it impossible for help vampires to degrade the quality of the channel. It help to keep the signal-noise high low.

Create a channel where people new to ruby can learn by observing

But people with experience talking about a topic are a great resource for less experienced users. Simply by reading conversations and see how solutions to problems are formed and implemented in code can help to learn new patterns or even be inspiring. For this reason the channel is still public.

Establish a network of people who can aid ruby, its libs and documentation

Most often you will find that those with the most experience also suffer the most under flaws in a language, a library or a framework. Given the available expertise it would be incredible to leverage that knowledge and improve ruby where possible. For one alone such a task can be too much, but with the support of a whole channel full of experts backing one up, it becomes a lot easier.

Have an active and interactive source of news

Everybody only has so and so much time to spare to explore new ways, new tools, how to best use them, compare them etc. Yet new tools and new ways can be very important to the coders everyday life. Here too leveraging the common knowledge of experienced users would be for the benefit of all. To this avail we frequently hold gatherings, where a few pros demo frameworks, libraries, tools and/or ways to code.