Just recently I had a pleasure to be at SRUG meeting in Gliwice, Poland. SRUG stands for Silesian Ruby Users Group and is a Ruby on Rails community of programmers and developers that hack websites using Ruby on Rails.

I had a great time participating in that SRUG event and listening to two great presentations about Ruby on Rails and developing in general. First presentation was about incoming changes in Ruby on Rails framework – the Rails 3.x, made by José Valim, a recent addition to the Rails core developer team. José, in 7 steps introduced SRUG attendants to incoming changes and features in Rails 3.x, convincing everyone that Rails 3.x will be ‘awesome’ in everyday coding challenges. José has been talking about ARel, respond_with functionality that makes Ruby on Rails controllers extra thin, customizable and modular rails generators and more.

The second presentation was about process of preaparing for development of web application, by Michal Czyz from Selleo. Michal presented a tool called cucumber_fm that supports scope management using cucumber features as specification, in Ruby on Rails web applications. Basically a point of this presentation was approaching issue of extra work that is being done with the client to make a Ruby on Rails project specification and how to minimize that work while introducing better experience and quality for customer.

Hopefully you can also find a great community near you, like SRUG in Poland.