# What to do?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-to-do/145425>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [August 9, 2008, 4:19am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-to-do/145425 "2008-08-09T04:19:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![miniskirt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/a87d85/32.png) [@miniskirt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/miniskirt)\
**Post date:** [August 9, 2008, 4:19am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-to-do/145425/1 "2008-08-09T04:19:38Z")

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Hey, I learnt Ruby for a school project I had to do a while ago.

It was superficial knowledge so I wanted to develop it so I read the  
Pickaxe book as well as the Ruby Way.

Now I know a lot about Ruby … but don’t know what to do …  
I mean, I have no real use for it in my daily work, and knowing all that  
great stuff is frustrating …

`hope you understand my POV …

thx

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![miniskirt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/a87d85/32.png) [@miniskirt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/miniskirt)\
**Post date:** [August 9, 2008, 10:21am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/what-to-do/145425/2 "2008-08-09T10:21:02Z")

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On 09.08.2008 04:17, Mini Skirt wrote:

> Hey, I learnt Ruby for a school project I had to do a while ago.
> 
> It was superficial knowledge so I wanted to develop it so I read the  
> Pickaxe book as well as the Ruby Way.
> 
> Now I know a lot about Ruby … but don’t know what to do …  
> I mean, I have no real use for it in my daily work, and knowing all that  
> great stuff is frustrating …
> 
> `hope you understand my POV …

Sort of. If nobody gives you a programming task or if you do not have  
an idea of some project that you want to do for yourself then there’s  
probably little room for exercising your Ruby-foo right now.

A place where you could look for Ruby programming tasks are those sites  
like [rubyforge.org](http://rubyforge.org) or [sourceforge.net](http://sourceforge.net), i.e. pick an open source project  
that sounds interesting or that you would like to contribute to. Do  
some patches or suggestions, hand them in so people see what you are  
doing and how you are doing it and eventually become a member of the  
team - if you wish so.

Another option might be to pick a book on algorithms and data  
structures, work your way through it and reimplement examples presented  
in Ruby. This will help your Ruby-foo while at the same time providing  
some valuable basic computer science knowledge - valuable of course only  
if you embark on a career that involves software development in one way  
or another.

A little bit of comfort might be that your newly acquired knowledge is  
not dead. You might not have an immediate use for it but it might be  
useful later - maybe even in ways that you do not imagine right now.

Having said that I hope you nevertheless enjoy Ruby and using it. 🙂

Kind regards

robert