I've been helping to run a meetup in Christchurch, New Zealand: https://christchurch.ruby.nz/ for about 10 years (maybe longer, I've lost track!). I _completed_ agree with the article that the best thing you can do to avoid burnout is to organise it with someone else (or better still, two or more others like we do).
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!
I run the Python meetup in Thessaloniki, Greece, and it's exhausting trying to find speakers.I frequently skip months because nobody wants to present anything, and we aim to have two presentations on each meetup. I'm almost always the second presenter, and sometimes I'll do both presentations myself (or just skip that month's event).
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.
This seemed like a great guide to starting any sort of meetup, not just Ruby, FWIW. Good read. I think a lot of meetups fizzled in non-hub cities. I lived in Portland, OR up until recently and we had a vibrant meet-up scene before covid where there was lots of walking to different tech offices and you could typically find a meetup every day of the work week, now its pretty dead on most fronts and there is definitely opportunity for folks to step in and restart it!
Seriously, there is more to computing than the Web. I've used Ruby for more than 25 years and never used Rails. I'm a computational biologist and like to use Bioruby to automate various sequence-based tasks. Not as popular as BioPython (or I suppose Bioperl if anyone is still using that), but a similar niche.
That's great, but from my experience, 90% of Rubyists I met are working with Rails.
"Divorcing" from Rails is therefore absurd, just stuff people say who don't like DHH for one reason or another.
We work with Rails but there is more to programming (and Ruby) than work. Sinatra micro services were a thing for a while. Hanami is decent. But the reason we use Rails is pretty simple…it’s great, easy to onboard developers, it’s battle tested, well maintained and has a massive ecosystem.
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.
Oh my god, Salt Lake City! I never see anything here, and the first thing I click on today no less... unfortunately I'm not a Ruby programmer but I'm happy to see that some stuff is happening here.
Organizer of python Atlanta here. If you’re interested in running your own ruby meetup and would like some assistance from someone from the trenches then email me. Happy to support the community.
How to make a network on meetups and turn into opportunity I mean asking for referral in their companies. first of all how to open without hesitation..
It pairs quite nicely with agentic development as it has a history of plenty of open-source projects published on GitHub, which means they have learned to work with Rails et al. rather well.
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.
For languages, I'd say Gleam and OxCaml are going to become more and more popular on here. Not sure what else.
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.
I've been helping to run a meetup in Christchurch, New Zealand: https://christchurch.ruby.nz/ for about 10 years (maybe longer, I've lost track!). I _completed_ agree with the article that the best thing you can do to avoid burnout is to organise it with someone else (or better still, two or more others like we do).
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!
One of the best meetups in Ōtautahi!
That's crazy. A dev meetup in Northampton UK has backlog for 10 months of talks. Although it is generalist.
I run the Python meetup in Thessaloniki, Greece, and it's exhausting trying to find speakers.I frequently skip months because nobody wants to present anything, and we aim to have two presentations on each meetup. I'm almost always the second presenter, and sometimes I'll do both presentations myself (or just skip that month's event).
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.
Someone should do a Delphi meetup at Delphi
About thirty years too late, or two thousand years too late, depending on your viewpoint.
This seemed like a great guide to starting any sort of meetup, not just Ruby, FWIW. Good read. I think a lot of meetups fizzled in non-hub cities. I lived in Portland, OR up until recently and we had a vibrant meet-up scene before covid where there was lots of walking to different tech offices and you could typically find a meetup every day of the work week, now its pretty dead on most fronts and there is definitely opportunity for folks to step in and restart it!
Ruby needs to divorce itself from Rails.
for it to find it's footing again and grow.
wonderful language, wonderful ecosystem - but the Rails albatross - will be the death of ruby.
Show me on the doll where DHH hurt you
Seriously, there is more to computing than the Web. I've used Ruby for more than 25 years and never used Rails. I'm a computational biologist and like to use Bioruby to automate various sequence-based tasks. Not as popular as BioPython (or I suppose Bioperl if anyone is still using that), but a similar niche.
That's great, but from my experience, 90% of Rubyists I met are working with Rails. "Divorcing" from Rails is therefore absurd, just stuff people say who don't like DHH for one reason or another.
We work with Rails but there is more to programming (and Ruby) than work. Sinatra micro services were a thing for a while. Hanami is decent. But the reason we use Rails is pretty simple…it’s great, easy to onboard developers, it’s battle tested, well maintained and has a massive ecosystem.
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.
this is great example of framing.
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.
If you're in the Salt Lake County/Utah County area, we're having Ruby meetups: https://www.meetup.com/utah-ruby-users-group/
Oh my god, Salt Lake City! I never see anything here, and the first thing I click on today no less... unfortunately I'm not a Ruby programmer but I'm happy to see that some stuff is happening here.
I wrote up some related thoughts on wrangling speakers: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/3283
I've built a site https://www clublaunchpad.com/
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.
Organizer of python Atlanta here. If you’re interested in running your own ruby meetup and would like some assistance from someone from the trenches then email me. Happy to support the community.
How to make a network on meetups and turn into opportunity I mean asking for referral in their companies. first of all how to open without hesitation..
I started one 15 years ago in Silicon Valley. Just what this article calls a hangout.
Is Ruby really where it's at right now?
It pairs quite nicely with agentic development as it has a history of plenty of open-source projects published on GitHub, which means they have learned to work with Rails et al. rather well.
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.
For languages, I'd say Gleam and OxCaml are going to become more and more popular on here. Not sure what else.
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.
What do you mean? It’s been around for a while and people still use it yes