Writing things from scratch that work as you want is not as difficult task, be able to understand and apply someone else's work (and in Open Source we must do t

Writing things from scratch that work as you want is not as difficult task, be able to understand and apply someone else's work (and in Open Source we must do this every day) is a much more valuable skill. When you don't want to travel for longer time, at least travel to conferences ( (e.g. RubyManor will happen again this year or January in London) or larger User Group meetings. Those are great opportunities to learn about the newest stuff and directly talk with someone about this. That's very much different to just reading it in the internets.