Ask HN: What is the popularity of Rails outside of Silicon Valley? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is the popularity of Rails outside of Silicon Valley?

4 pointsthisisdallas5 comments

Rails has a very high level of popularity on HN as well as in Silicon Valley. I haven't looked at job openings in every major city but it seems like a large majority of Rails jobs are found in Silicon Valley. Clearly, there are Rails jobs all over the US but is the assumption that the majority are found in Silicon Valley correct?

How do other languages compare in the rest of the US? For example, I can almost certainly guarantee that I will never live in San Francisco or even California so would taking the time to learn Rails over another language be beneficial if my end goal is to just have a developer job? I am currently a front end dev but I would love to gain a solid understanding of a backend language as well. I am located in Texas and looking at job openings in Dallas, Houston etc. etc. it seems like they are geared more towards .Net or PHP. Even looking at other cities with a population under or just above 1mil it looks like they have more job openings for languages other than Ruby.

Any thoughts and or comments?

Atlanta has a decent size rails community.

You should consider looking more deeply into the positions that are available. Companies who use .Net tend to be older and more mature businesses (likely because .Net is not open source) and I am not positive but I would think that they are looking for highly experienced developers. I would take a close look at the entry level positions that are available in the area that you want to work and possibly even contact those companies and ask what exactly they're looking for.

Also, a possible imperfect way to determine the ROR community size in a city is by searching for Ruby / Rails meetups in the area.

To be honest, I think ruby is a very good backend language to start out with. The syntax is very clean and easy to understand, the online resources are very vast and up to date. A lot of startups use ruby on rails because you're able to build apps very fast with it. That's why you see a lot of rails job openings in Silicon Valley, because that's where a lot of the startups are.

I live in Texas also, I know for sure that Austin has a good community of ruby developers along with Boston.

Oh, yeah, I guess I should have said something along the lines "excluding Austin".

Rails is pretty popular everywhere.

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