If you prefer .test then by all means do so. The whole TLD is restricted for that use. Some TLD also have dedicated test domains, any of those is perfectly fine - test.com (or test.de) for that matter is not.
I come from Java/JEE and I would choose Ruby any day of the week. Some former colleagues had bad Python experiences. Some others have their first working experience in Ruby and want to go somewhere where the grass is greener.
IMO what makes programmers happy is not so much a programming language in particular but rather the context surrounding the job: role in the team, age of the codebase, fun colleagues, level of "corporatism", good or bad management if any, how much code you are able to ship per day, etc.
Lots of people don't like maintaining other or former colleagues' code, especially when the codebase starts turning into a legacy one. This is true in every language.
There are several solutions for this, but I personally take the easy way out: quit your job and be the first developer in a new startup, or do some freelance work. Whatever you need that floats your boat
If you can read French I recommend "Petit traité de manipulation à l'usage des honnêtes gens". To give you an idea, the translated title would be "Little treatise on manipulation for honest people". Unfortunately, it is only available in French.
I ran a little comparison with both Oh-my-zsh and Prezto with roughly the same plugins: http://i.imgur.com/cDSRZuO.png. There's almost a 0.4s difference. In practice it makes for a noticeable 0.5-1s difference (with all the other stuff I have in my .zshrc).
Looks active to me: the repo owner actively participates in bugs/PR opened days or hours ago.
As for the article, I started it in May, forgot about it, then released it today. Hence the May 2014 date.
