My top 5 pick Clean Code by Unble Bob Code Complete by Steve Mcconnell Refactoring by Kent Beck Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler Test Driven Development by Kent Beck

Not. It also doesn't give accuracy compare to other implementation. I re-written a java algorithm using ruby for now. I will be replacing it with a faster C/C++ implementation later.

If you are google services fan, checkout Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging platform .

If anybody still needs more motivation​, read http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/how-to-succeed-professionally-by-helping-others/284429

Starting point: Explore repos on github of your interest and use https://www.codetriage.com/ to get a handful of issues from your favorite repos in your inbox every day. This service will help to save your time searching for issues. Later you can narrow down projects to contribute and go directly to issues list and pickup. Also look for PR generated in the project you are interested. It will give you different viewpoints which is very important for building real engineering capability.

If you are considering Rails 5 then it is lot easier to develop using shiny ActionCable feature. Action Cable seamlessly integrates WebSockets to give real-time data transfer in rails. Checkout DHH's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0WUjGkDFS0

How about using AMQP solutions like RabbitMQ for guaranteed message delivery and processing? You can create UUID before pushing Post creation job in a queue and return same to the user which can be use later to find the post. Here is a nice article about how to use and integrate RabbitMQ in Ruby.