During your daily use of the NetBeans Ruby support, you are constantly figuring out how to best use the language and the IDE to help you get your job done. Hopefully, the tutorials and articles help you towards your goals, but one size does not fit all. You all have diverse perspectives of the product as you implement your different use cases and scenarios. In addition, you bring with you different sets of habits, mental models, processes, and standards.

As you work with the product, you gain valuable nuggets of information that would be of benefit to others who run into the same situations. The NetBeans Ruby community wiki provides the means to share that knowledge.

You might think that you have to be a subject matter expert before you can contribute, but that is far from true. Often, people who are new to using the NetBeans Ruby support are the perfect teachers for other beginners. You can understand and emphasize with them, and you are probably encountering the same bumps, hurdles, and misunderstandings. Or maybe you are just one step ahead and can help others from making the same mistakes. Also, the act of writing might make your own understanding all that more concrete.

There are many ways in which you can be involved in the NetBeans Ruby community.

• Users Alias. The users@ruby.netbeans.org email alias is a quick and easy way ask questions and help out others. An added advantage is that the developers are listening and many improvements have been made to the product because people took the time to write their issues and wishes. Often times, during the act of describing your problem concisely, you get the big Aha! that makes the answer obvious. In that case, since you have already written up the problem, you might as well share your problem and solution with the community.
  
  
• FAQs. The FAQ is composed of easy to create and edit wiki pages. The users alias is a good place to look up solutions, but even better is when someone takes the time to summarize a long thread from the users alias into one page of essential information. Another good use for FAQs is to share gotchas and tips.
  
  
• Blogs, Tutorials, and Articles. If you blog about NetBeans Ruby support, notify the users alias so we can link to you. If you want to write a tutorial or article, get in touch with the NetBeans Community Docs Contribution Coordinator Amit Kumar Saha (See Community Docs for instructions). Also let us know, so we can link to your doc from the Ruby Documentation wiki page. We will also be glad to help you with reviews and such.
  
  
• Submit Code. The Ruby Participation wiki page tells how to join the development effort. The Ruby Code Ideas wiki page lists possible projects to work on -- both large and small. Two other ways to contribute are to submit Ruby hints and quick fixes (see Writing New Ruby Hints) and provide suggestions for Ruby code templates.

So, how do you Ruby? Got a nugget to share? We would love to hear from you.