Ruby in the Twin Cities in 2006

Nick Sieger — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 05:17:30 +0000

Mirroring the wider global trend, Ruby has seen a big uptick of growth in my hometown of Minneapolis over the past year.

A little over one year ago, the very first meeting of the Ruby Users of Minnesota (affectionately known as “Java Programmers Anonymous”) was held. I was not in attendance (until the second meeting in late December), but by the January/February timeframe we had a surprisingly good showing of 15-20 people. We’ve sustained or exceeded that number since, packing our group in the back of a Dunn Brothers Coffee on Loring Park the last Tuesday of every month.

More interesting a metric is how the number of people doing Ruby full-time has progressed. Somewhere around spring-time, guys were starting to itch for work. By summer time, Slantwise Design, formerly a mostly-web-design shop had been hired to do its first Rails contract, for what would turn out to be Sayswap. Slantwise is a Rails-exclusive shop now.

Rails Day had an entry from Bruno Bornsztein and Ben Moore, Sneakology. This prolific duo would go on to contract on YFly, and play around with a local one-page news aggregator at Acu.mn. Almost two months ago, they went live with their new startup, Curbly, a social-networking DIY design community.

We’re also happy to lay claim to RUM regulars Charles Oliver Nutter and Thomas Enebo, the two lead JRuby developers, who tirelessly give monthly updates on the lightning progress that JRuby is undergoing.

All in all, there are at least 20 full-time Rubyists in the Twin Cities, and the number is going up week by week.

Yours truly has been doing Ruby mostly-full-time for my current employer Digital River, where I’m proud to have sneaked Ruby into the system. There are at least two other programmers writing Ruby code at DR, and hopefully we’ll be hiring more in 2007. If you’re looking for work or interested in what we’re doing with Ruby, drop me a line!

So what happened this year in other user groups around the world?

Nick Sieger: Tag usergroup

Ruby in the Twin Cities in 2006