How to Start a Ruby Meetup
guides.rubyevents.org
guides.rubyevents.org
The other thing which really worked for us: We were getting fed up trying to badger people to help give talks etc (or just doing it ourselves). Completely exhausting. Ended up saying to the community: "this is your meetup, we just help run it. If we don't get 11 speakers for the year we're going to shut it down". We asked in January, got 11 speakers for the year (Dec is social), and we've been doing it like that ever since. Works an absolute treat. You do need to be prepared for no one to step up, in which case, it's sad, but, shut it down. You're not the community, the community is the community!
It is exhausting, and people do always ask when the next one is, but my reply of "whenever you want to speak" doesn't seem to do much to get more speakers.
for it to find it's footing again and grow.
wonderful language, wonderful ecosystem - but the Rails albatross - will be the death of ruby.
I don’t even care that DHH is a Nazi because you know what I can use it for non-Nazi stuff and there’s nothing he can do about it. I get his labour for free. He’s like my little Nazi monkey slave.
my take I use ruby a lot too - DHH might be disagreeable - but the one thing is one bright light i.e Rails ends up dimming the others. so when it cracks - like it did - people go to the next room, even though the current room has enough light.
It's a Kickstarter for groups that want to feel like they are a club. This helps with the chicken and egg problem.
UK only at the moment but that's easily changed if anyone asked interest elsewhere.
It also helps to have a "boring" framework with strong opinions and strong community standards etc.
I wouldn't claim it to be the best as I'm not sure how you'd measure that, but I can say that in my experience it is letting me build things to a decent standard really rather quickly.
If you're building something new today, I'd generally recommend starting with a framework that you already know. But for those of us who already know Rails, it continues to be a wonderful choice. I'm playing with Phoenix LiveView for some projects, which is letting me build real-time UI's really easily – but they have some real-time requirements which Rails can do but is not it's strength. For anything a little more CRUD, it's a no-brainer.
In the industry, Ruby often (but not always) pairs with Rails. Ruby+Rails exists in a sweet spot of making most of the mundane bullshit of writing software vanish, you spend 80% of your time thinking about your business problem, and that was before LLMs. With LLMs, you can get a lot done.
It wouldn't surprise me if AI economics act as a forcing function for more Ruby adoption.