I have been working on Ruby since I heard the song "Ruby" by the Kaiser Chiefs.
Ruby changed my IDE. Before that I was doing mostly Java in IntelliJ, but Ruby allowed to return full-time to my beloved Emacs.
I love Ruby for its expressiveness, its delightful approach to OOP and its amazing community.
I hate Ruby for its complexity and the shortcomings of its most popular runtime.
Most terrible architectural solution/code I have ever met is 100k lines of Java code in a single class.
The most spectacular Ruby news in 2014 was the announcement of the Volt web framework.
Life after Ruby is Clojure. It's legit!
Currently I am working on a ton of exciting stuff, but I'm too lazy to go into any specifics.
My dev environment contains OS X, Emacs, zsh, iTerm & Dash.
My favorite Ruby blogs\communities\websites are Ruby5, Ruby Rogues & Ruby Weekly.
I recommend "Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs" because it will expand your mind.
My personal life hack is "in case of trouble open the next beer".
If you want to become an expert you should work hard, play hard, party hard & drink a lot.