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!
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!
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
What do you mean? It’s been around for a while and people still use it yes