Very relevant post. I find myself having the same concern with some frequency, as I too work mainly with a stable set of applications using Rails.
In my opinion, continuing learning, as you mentioned is one way to keep advancing. You can focus on specific topics that interest you, for instance understanding how to tune Rails applications for performance, could be one.
I would also suggest contributing to open source (which can often have a steep learning curve) or working on a personal project.
The pet project might be a lot of extra work, depending on what you choose to build, but contributing to open source can be done in small steps, whenever you have free time.
I feel like the Ruby/Rails community is welcoming and open to new contributors, so perhaps that would be a starting point. Take a look at the gems you usually include in your projects and check their repositories for issues you can fix or improvements you want to implement. CodeTriage is also a nice place for finding repositories in need of help.
Open source contributions are a great idea, I think. I find it really daunting to jump in and contribute to a large, established project, but a lot of them make the process really easy. Especially around this time of year, with Hacktoberfest going on.
I guess the downside is that with open source contributions, especially if you're new to the project, you may find yourself mainly working on issues that you are comfortable with, rather than the ones that would really stretch you. That's been my experience, at least, but perhaps it's time to push the boat out a bit.
Thanks for sharing!
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Very relevant post. I find myself having the same concern with some frequency, as I too work mainly with a stable set of applications using Rails.
In my opinion, continuing learning, as you mentioned is one way to keep advancing. You can focus on specific topics that interest you, for instance understanding how to tune Rails applications for performance, could be one.
I would also suggest contributing to open source (which can often have a steep learning curve) or working on a personal project.
The pet project might be a lot of extra work, depending on what you choose to build, but contributing to open source can be done in small steps, whenever you have free time.
I feel like the Ruby/Rails community is welcoming and open to new contributors, so perhaps that would be a starting point. Take a look at the gems you usually include in your projects and check their repositories for issues you can fix or improvements you want to implement. CodeTriage is also a nice place for finding repositories in need of help.
I hope this helps at least a tiny bit! Cheers
Open source contributions are a great idea, I think. I find it really daunting to jump in and contribute to a large, established project, but a lot of them make the process really easy. Especially around this time of year, with Hacktoberfest going on.
I guess the downside is that with open source contributions, especially if you're new to the project, you may find yourself mainly working on issues that you are comfortable with, rather than the ones that would really stretch you. That's been my experience, at least, but perhaps it's time to push the boat out a bit.
Thanks for sharing!