Pat Shaughnessy has a great idea for people looking to improve their Ruby skills, study commits to Rails:
There are plenty of examples of elegant code, cool testing techniques and great new features in Rails if you go and look for them, but what impressed me the most were the small things. Like the small, in-between notes and simple harmonies in the midst of a large symphony, the Rails commits that caught my eye were tiny changes made by the Rails core team that were easy to miss, but that showed their real passion and love for Rails.
Pat highlights some of his favorite commits and even takes a closer in-depth look a few of the good ones.