This is part 3 in our ongoing conversation - “Advice For Ruby Beginners“.

Satish>> What opportunities exist in your country for Ruby freshers; people who know Core Ruby thoroughly?

Agnieszka (Poland)>> Companies that use Ruby and RoR are mostly happy to hire both Ruby experts and beginners. Those are usually small companies, some of them with a very agile spirit. Larger companies are mostly too conservative to adopt this technology and I don’t expect it to change soon. Now and then somebody is looking for programmers to join a startup, also investors from abroad seek Polish coders. It seems that demand for Ruby skills is on the rise and it is likely that soon companies will be looking for training from Ruby experts.

Fabio (Brazil)>> As I said before, big companies will not get into the Ruby or Rails business for the time being. I’ve been a consultant for this kind of corporations for the last 5 years and I already recognize their vices. We are also not used to have hundreds of startups, because we don’t have as many investors as in the USA. So it is very hard to start a small company here. But there are thousands of medium-class businesses that don’t care about brand: they care to have their work done with quality and within reasonable costs. That’s the market that Rails programmers will serve. As 37signals said: we don’t need to target just the Fortune 500, we have to look after the Fortune 5,000. There’s no free lunch though: most younger programmers care about having stable jobs, not playing with their favorite technologies. They don’t study because they like, but because they need the credentials to get in big companies. The kind of professionals that will try Rails, will be necessarily outside of this status quo. At least for now. Ruby/Rails developers all have an entrepreneurship spirit. They are not plain reckless, but they enjoy taking some risks. That’s people that can see what has the potential to eventually become ‘the next big thing’. We like to be independent, we don’t like tedious jobs, boring tasks, and annoying co-workers. We want to stay ahead of the competition. We are not afraid of new things, we are not afraid of becoming obsolete, we are not concerned of last year’s certifications getting old. We don’t care about having fancy business cards and using brand new ties. Current Ruby/Rails developers are the kind of people that push the whole market forward. We think different. This is not a mass market yet, so if you want the easy route, I can’t recommend this, otherwise you are very welcome. Bottom line is: there’s not an established market ready to welcome new Ruby or Rails developers, yet. You’ll have to dig further on your own. If you want to start your own company, this is a great tool to get the job done. And this is a globalized world, we can’t be limited by our own territorial boundaries. There’s plenty of jobs available in other countries and many are willing to have offshore outsourced resources. Brazil is very very compelling as an outsourcing shop. We are cheaper because of the current dollar exchange rate. A good opportunity to start working for foreign companies.

Jamie (UK)>> Well mostly you’re looking at sysadmin work, web development work, and maybe glue code work.

Jamis (USA)>> There are a lot of job opportunities for people with Rails experience. If you want to do more general work with Ruby, your options are more limited, but I found that even in my previous job (where I did Java all day) I was able to use Ruby for various tasks, like code generation and system administration. Opportunities are where you make them!

Jens (Switzerland)>> I guess most of the companies that use Ruby in Switzerland would be looking for people that know Ruby. I know I do - I could use someone with Ruby skills immediately. I’m not sure about the large companies, the banks, the insurance companies. From what I hear, they are still very much “traditional” shops (Java, dot Net) and haven’t made the switch yet to the agile scripting languages. I guess they will turn around, when for example JRuby becomes more mature.

Juanjo (Spain)>> Thanks to Rails there is a good demand for web-developers. As far as I know, if you are a good Ruby/RoR programmer, you can easily find a job in Spain. And I think soon, the big companies will start using Ruby and some colleges will start teaching Ruby so this is just the beginning.

Julian (Netherlands)>> I did talk about this in my previous reply.

Manik (India)>> As I mentioned in my last answer, there is a strong and growing demand for Ruby and Rails developers in India. There are a lot of consultant companies doing Rails development. There are a lot of product companies developing products on Rails and Ruby. If you know of some really good developers, could you ask them to send their resumes to me

Matt (Australia)>> There’s not a lot of call for pure Ruby developers, like there is for (say) Java developers. Mostly it’s “we want a sysadmin who scripts in Ruby” or developing in Rails.

Mislav (Croatia)>> A quick search for “ruby” on several popular job boards here didn’t yield anything. But I guess that companies are starting to get interested even here and that we will soon see an increase in job demand. There is always an option for freelancing in the meantime. There are also opportunities to be employed remotely in a company that might be far from you, even in the US. Hey - it’s the Internet

Ola (Sweden)>> I think the time is ripe to get the larger companies of Sweden to accept Ruby and Rails. Most of them haven’t yet, but most of them are also forward thinking, innovative and not as conservative as similar companies in other countries. I would say that spreading the message and teaching Ruby can definitely be done in Sweden right now.

Pedro (Portugal)>> I think in Portugal, the same thing applies to Ruby as for other Languages, the market is booming and for anyone dominating Ruby, work isn’t really going to be a problem. The market is actually lacking good programmers at all levels.

Peter (UK)>> In terms of job opportunities, the UK does better than most of the world, but pales in comparison to the United States where there are literally hundreds of jobs available. Ruby and Rails don’t have considerable mindshare here, and lag a long way behind technologies such as Java or .NET. I think people tend to make their own opportunities, though, and if working with Ruby and Rails gets someone excited enough to start their own Web site or consultancy business, there’s the opportunity to make money wherever you are.

Remco (Netherlands)>> There’s a lot of demand for computer specialists in the Netherlands and in the recent year this includes Ruby programmers. Rails has spawned a lot of companies in the Netherlands too. They are successfully competing which more established web application builders and a lot of these latter companies are switching there web development to Rails. No matter where you are, if web development is your trade, you should learn about Ruby and Ruby on Rails or stick with your stuff and join the ranks of Cobol programmers.

Sau (Singapore)>> Ruby is used professionally in an increasing number of small startups and consulting companies in Singapore. There are many job openings available and often posted up in the SRB Google Group.

Satish>> Any other suggestions for these participants (would-be Ruby developers)?

Agnieszka (Poland)>> Get down to work and never stop improving your skills. Develop an addiction to coding standards and automated testing. Take as much as possible from the real and virtual community, but don’t forget to give back - publish code, help answer other people’s questions, participate in events. Take your time to try out other languages, make sure you know why Ruby is your language of choice.

Fabio (Brazil)>> My recommendations usually go beyond a particular technology. Of course, the Big Thing of the hour is definitely Ruby on Rails. It is rising very fast, it’s being matured, the community is exponentially growing, tools are being refined. The market is just starting to pay attention. We have to stay updated by the minute. Learn more. Learn beyond one tool or one language. There’s been Language-Wars, Frameworks-Wars in the past, there’s been some recently. It happens not because people actually ‘like’ their old technology, but because they can’t see ahead of their noses. They are ‘afraid’ of being wrong, of change. Career people don’t like changing. They want to stay in a solid and very predictive route, a very smooth ride up the mountain slope. That’s not the reality: things eventually change. Technology changes even faster. It’s changing right now and just closing your eyes will not modify this very fact. Other people think that learning things that they can’t immediately use is waste of resources, which is not true. Education is an investment. You can only recognize its value once you need it, not before.

Jamie (UK)>> Get public with your findings, blog heavily, get known. The Ruby community is a small world, and it’s easy to spot the talented folk at a distance with a little google and a few recommendations.

Jamis (USA)>> Be passionate! If you’re only learning Ruby as a resume item, you’re doomed to fail, simply because the Ruby/Rails landscape is full of passionate programmers who will always out-perform and out-resume you. If you are truly passionate about Ruby, that passion will shine through. Be prolific! Write code. Write _lots_ of code. And don’t be afraid to throw away most of it. Just as a writer learns to write by writing, so a programmer learns to program by programming. Be social! Find (or found!) an open-source project that appeals to you, and start looking for ways to contribute to it. Nothing pushes your skills so much as having other experienced programmers that can review and critique your code, and that’s what happens when you submit a patch to a project.

Jens (Switzerland)>> Enjoy programming. Have fun. Ruby helps you with that. Get involved in the local community. And be open about languages. Ruby is but one of the many fine programming languages out there.

Juanjo (Spain)>> Write code. Try new things. Learn from others and help other people to learn. Ruby community is a small and nice one, so be a part of it and participate.

Julian (Netherlands)>> Use Ruby to break out of the old technology you have been using before. Try all the weird quirky things in it that are new to you (like meta-programming, continuations, exceptions, base class extensions) to know it better. If you have been doing languages like PHP before (this primarily applies to web developers) - take this opportunity to learn how to deploy in the real world, without the warm fuzzy feeling of an admin-tuned restricted copy of mod_php that will just destroy your program after the page is sent off. And read lots of source written by others, ultimately. Refactor and unit test mercilessly, because otherwise you might have been much better off doing Perl. And do not get too stuck in the Rails world - there’s more to Ruby than just Rails, and there are some pragmatic decisions made by David that might limit your approach to the language.

Manik (India)>>
a. Strengthen the basics.
b. Write a lot of code.
c. Read though lots of existing open source applications including Rails.
d. Read a lot of blogs and stay on top of what is new and happening.
e. Try to form or join developer communities and participate in developer community events, with the aim of sharing and learning.
f. Release code to open source, because that makes you think if there is a better way of writing the same code. You would of course want to share your best code with the world! That being said, don’t wait forever to get the code in the best shape to release. Release and clearly mention the known issues.

Matt (Australia)>> Program early and program often.

Mislav (Croatia)>> Embrace good practices early and solve problems the right way. For instance, unit-testing or BDD (behaviour-driven development) is something without which most of the things in Ruby/Rails world would be unthinkable. Ensure clean separation of your modules and always know which part is responsible for what. Learn how to love the console (if you are a Windows person). If you will be working with Rails, use edge Rails (meaning the newest development version) from the start, because it is soon-to-be Rails 2.0. And, as I’ve already said, let things challenge you. Programming is not dull and “geeky” anymore; it’s creative and exciting. If you are from Croatia and need direction, feel free to email me. I’d really like our community to get stronger. Good luck!

Ola (Sweden)>> Just to keep digging. Ruby is a lovely language with depths that can take years to grasp. Just because you don’t understand a feature doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a use. Most things in Ruby are there for a reason - so keep looking.

Pedro (Portugal)>> Join online and local developers communities, that’s the fastest and easiest way to learn and share knowledge. Why not use this already existing networks as an advantage point? I think this would be my most important and humble suggestion.

Peter (UK)>> It’s easy to become frustrated when you’re working on some code (even a single line) and it doesn’t do what you expect. Rather than get frustrated, try to break your code down into the smallest pieces possible to see where the bug is occurring. Most “bugs”, I’ve found, tend to come from our own incorrect assumptions about how things work, rather than errors made by the language or the computer itself. If you break things down into tiny pieces, you can quickly find out where things aren’t working as planned and be able to tackle any tricky debugging situation!

Remco (Netherlands)>> Make DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) one of your mantras. Avoiding copy-and-pasting trains your Ruby muscles! On the subject of copying, don’t copy code from others without understanding it. Proper code isn’t hard to read, don’t be satisfied when it works for you but you do not know why. And finally remember: there’s no Ruby nirvana. Every Ruby developer is rediscovering Ruby on a regular basis, including Matz. People are doing amazing things with this language, finding new angles to solve problems. Be prepared to keep learning this language and enjoy the ride.

David (USA)>> I’ve learned a ton of Ruby by helping other people learn, and answering questions on mailing lists. Of course you have to be comfortable with doing this, but it can be very beneficial for you as well as the people you’re helping. Whenever someone asks a question that I can’t answer, but think I should be able to, I try to figure it out and come up with an answer. That way they get an answer, and I learn something.

Sau (Singapore)>> Join the community, start the dialog. Programming with Ruby is fun and there are plenty of people who are willing to extend a helping hand. For any queries, feel free to discuss with me personally. Send me an Email at: cssheong[at]pacific[dot]net[dot]sg

Satish>> It has been fun interacting with you all and thank you for sharing your views with the RubyLearning.com members.

Advice For Ruby Beginners 1

Advice For Ruby Beginners 2

(This interview appeared before on 23rd Sept. 2006 on the PuneRuby blog).

Today we talk to Karmen Blake, a Ruby/Rails teacher at Spokane Community College.

Satish Talim>> Hello Karmen and welcome. Could you tell us something about yourself - your background; where you are based…?

Karmen Blake>> I teach in Spokane, WA at Spokane Community College. I went to Eastern Washington University right out of high school. I have a bachelors in Computer Science and Education (quite a combination, eh) and a masters in Technology Education with an emphasis in distance learning. After graduation I worked for a school district as a technology coordinator doing everything under the sun: training, web development, networking, and tech support. I was there for two years before moving on to the community college. Since being at the community college I have had the privilege to teach many exciting things such as XHTML, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, PHP, Java, JEE Web Tier, XML, MySQL, Ruby and Rails. For the last six years I have worked with many wonderful companies in town on short term contracts over summer break. I take that experience back to the classrooms. It is a win-win for the students and I.

Satish Talim>> Given the choices out there, why did you select Ruby?

Karmen Blake>> It is not that I sat down and did an ‘eeny, meeny, miny, mow’ and was stuck with Ruby. After years of priding myself on using PHP/MySQL and JSP/Servlets, I thought what else would I need for web development. Even though PHP and JSPs have their quirks, I worked through them and was proud of the things I could do with what I had in those platforms. The day I started reading the ‘pickaxe’ everything changed.

Satish Talim>> How did you learn Ruby and when?

Karmen Blake>> I was headed to a conference March of ‘04 in a plane ride from Seattle, WA to Orlando, Fl and just a few days before this, I received my copy of the ‘pickaxe’. Great timing for me to crack open this book and dive into Ruby on this plane trip. I started reading and was immediately impressed. I was so impressed I could not put the book down. I had read most of it by the time I got to Orlando. On the way back from the conference I re-read a majority of the book and skimmed parts I missed earlier.

Satish Talim>> Which features of Ruby do you like the most?

Karmen Blake>> As a teacher and having taught many different languages I compare Ruby to these languages that I knew. In particular I compare Ruby to Java. I taught a 3 quarter sequence in Java and so any language I learn I use Java as a litmus test. I love that in Ruby things are by default intuitive and natural (I know this sounds a little vague but for those who have used Ruby you know what I’m talking about). It just feels good. I love dynamically typed variables, everything is an object, attr_* family for classes, meta-programming and DSLs, iterators, and ruby library in general (I’m constantly amazed how I’ll find methods for exactly what I need).

Satish Talim>> Do you think Ruby has the potential to be a mainstream programming language?

Karmen Blake>> Will Ruby be a mainstream language? I don’t know. I believe it has the potential to be a mainstream language. My gauge for ‘gone mainstream’ is if it is adopted by computer science departments. Computer science departments in general are slow adopters of languages and don’t switch unless a language is either mainstream or has been mainstream. Fortunately I teach at a community college where I get to move quicker in relation to the industry. I make many curriculum changes every year to keep up. Most teachers think I’m crazy for keeping up with technology but I think it is exciting! Who would want to teach the same thing year after year after year for 25-30 years? Not me! As a result, the 3 quarter sequence that I used to teach in Java - Drum roll, please - I use Ruby now. More recently I’ve added another class to the mix so I teach a total of 3 Ruby classes and a Rails class. That is now 4 classes that involve Ruby. How cool is that?!!

Satish Talim>> What applications, utilities have you developed in Ruby and what platform are you running these applications on?

Karmen Blake>> I use my instructor website as my Rails sandbox. I try new things on it first. Starting this last summer and currently I am consulting using Rails. I’m pushing Rails into places where Java/JEE used to reside. As a result I have had to do some integration work using Ruby, Java, and XML. In my consulting work I use a Mac and at the college I use Ubuntu. Last year I presented Ruby and Rails at the Course Technology Conference and it went over well. I’m trying to do my part in education to push Ruby and Rails to a mostly .NET and PHP crowd.

Satish Talim>> Anything else you would like to share with us?

Karmen Blake>> Thanks for giving me this opportunity to share and inspire others.

Satish Talim>> Thanks Karmen for sharing your views with our members.

This is part 2 in our ongoing conversation - “Advice For Ruby Beginners“.

Satish>> What kind of mini-projects one should work on, to get a good grasp on Ruby?

Agnieszka (Poland)>> Something useful for you personally or internally for your company, this way you’ll be very clear about initial requirements. Two things to remember from the start are “Keep It Simple, Stupid” and “You Ain’t Gonna Need It” - rereading your code and looking for better solutions with those in mind will be extremely didactic and rewarding.

David (USA)>> It’s hard to generalize, but it’s often a good idea to isolate something fairly specific — say, DRb (distributed Ruby) or the GDBM API — and write something small, even if it isn’t terribly useful in the long term, to get practice. That’s how I learn, anyway. My “hacking/” directory is full of small, working examples of things I wanted to learn about.

Fabio (Brazil)>> In the open source community there’s that great motto: “scratch your own itch”. I’d suggest the same thing. Just because you saw the now famous blog screencast from David Hansson, you don’t have to start with a blog. I won’t tell you what to do. You can’t learn how to paint if you don’t know what you’d want to picture. You can’t be a good chef if you don’t know what do you’d want to eat. Do something for yourself. You don’t have a blog yet? Great, instead of signing up for Wordpress, create your own blog. You’d like an online portfolio for your photographs? Good, instead of signing up for Flickr, create your own online album. It doesn’t need to be as full featured. You need the basics: do the basics. If it can’t fit in a week of spare time development, it’s too much. You will learn fast if you have something that you need and you develop it on your own. That’s the spirit of the craftsmanship: once you start your own project, you will play the several different roles: not only programming, but also design, systems administration and so on. That makes you a more complete and competent professional. Everything new you learn adds up to your craft.

Jamie (UK)>> Well that depends on the person learning it. I’ve always found it best to learn whilst doing something productive, so if you’re a sysadmin then learn how to automate some of your daily tasks, or maybe you’re a web developer…so learn through Rails.

Jamis (USA)>> Anything. What do you need? What are you interested in? My first real project in Ruby was a simple web server, and it turned out to take only 400 lines of code or so.

Jens (Switzerland)>> Whatever interests you - small systems utilities, games, tools you can use for your current projects. I bet you have dozens of ideas of things to write. Pick on of them and get started.

Juanjo (Spain)>> Whatever fits your needs. I think the important thing with a project you are using to learn, is that it is useful for some personal need, so you keep having fun and are also interested in finishing it for its own sake, not just to learn a new language. A good approach is to find a library you like and try to code as a mini-project where you can use it.

Julian (Netherlands)>> Anything that suits your fancy, except a GUI application. There is a big amount of flux in this area, and you will be immediately burdened with choosing the right GUI toolkit, making it run cross-platform etc. Anything else should work - text processing and the web (using vanilla CGI), maintenance scripts, socket servers. IRC bots. Whatever suits your fancy.

Manik (India)>> I think, one can start with any app for self use, following the “scratch your own itch” notion of the open source community. Any application that you need but is not there or can be improved upon will be a good target. The key to mastery however is persistence. Don’t just stop at the first usable version of the app. But re-factor it and try to make it dynamic and extendable by others. That is when a lot of learning happens.

Matt (Australia)>> I’m a re-implementationist. Write Ruby versions of small programs you use regularly. For Unix/Linux people, that’s easy — there’s a pile of small shell tools (grep, cat, sort, uniq, head, tail, echo, even sed) that you know (or should know) how to use, and that (in some cases) can be replaced with a single line (or a small number of lines) of Ruby. Windows people are behind the 8-ball on this, though, as GUI programming is orders of magnitude harder than console programming, and while Rails lowers the barriers to entry, it still involves understanding a lot more concepts than writing a replacement for grep. Beyond that, solving problems that you come across on a day-to-day basis is what keeps your skills sharp, and you should do it as often as you can. Never do anything repetitive on the computer if you can help it; while it might take you 10 minutes to do it by hand but an hour or two to write a program to do it, you’ll be: a. giving yourself a handy tool to use *next* time you need to do that repetitive task, and b. exercising your programming skills.

Mislav (Croatia)>> I wrote a lot of “screen-scraping” scripts; those are the ones that parse and extract data from web pages. I also started with scripts that process other kinds of input: certain log files or long lists of data that should be sanitized and imported into a database. Soon I was able to write useful scripts to solve a particular problem even quicker than actually searching if the problem was already been solved or before even thinking to use another language or tool. Then I started with easy Rails apps. The important thing is the attitude: have fun while doing it; let the problems challenge you.

Ola (Sweden)>> Anything that is hard or awkward in other languages usually make a good project for Ruby. This will allow you to go further out and find all of the more interesting things that Ruby is capable of. That said, most programmers have several manual processes in their daily life. A typical mini project would be to implement a tool that helps you with these daily tasks. Almost everything can be automated.

Pedro (Portugal)>> It’s always hard to reply to a question like this one, each project is a project, has it’s own requirements and constraints, Therefore I think you should leverage your projects according to your skills, but other than that, any project is a learning track. I specially recommend that people start with projects that they need or that they really understand; its a safe path for motivation.

Peter (UK)>> If you’re interested in Rails, the best projects would simply be Web sites and Web applications that you, yourself, need. For example, my “Code Snippets” project was started simply because I needed somewhere to store snippets of code. Within two years the site grew to hundreds of thousands of page-views each month and I sold the site to DZone.com. If you’re more interested in focusing on Ruby for the time being, then it’s worth focusing on projects that will give you the opportunity to try out lots of different aspects of Ruby’s core libraries. It’s amazing how many long-time Ruby developers, including myself, don’t realize when something we need is in the core library. Work your way through random classes and modules in the core library, becoming familiar with how to use new methods and techniques, and work your way up to more fully-featured programs over time. irb is great for this sort of experimentation.

Remco (Netherlands)>> Ruby is great for doing administrative things on your computer; find files, rename them according to their content, comparing directories. I have a bunch of scripts to do tasks like this. There even is a cool gem to organize script like that as rake tasks called sake. I like to speedup my work by making small Ruby DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) to make tedious jobs more manageable. For instance: last week I made a module to make creating S5 presentations easier. The module is just 20 lines of code but makes writing presentations a lot easier. Find an excuse to write Ruby code, there are plenty of opportunity!

Sau (Singapore)>> Any project is a good project as long as you’re interested in making it work. Even if it doesn’t work out right in the end, it’s the journey, not the goal, that will make it worthwhile.

Satish>> What’s the Ruby / Rails scene in your country?

Agnieszka (Poland)>> We have at least two Polish hosting companies that offer Ruby and Rails support. There are several software houses, startups and also freelancers. Ruby is present at international conferences held in Poland, there are a number of local ruby communities and the Polish Ruby and Ruby on Rails sites. Ruby books are published in Polish, and it is also taught at some academic institutions.

Fabio (Brazil)>> Brazil is not a place known for much technological breakthroughs. There are some, but limited. We are always playing catch up with the rest of the world. This is kind of a bad thing. I evaluate our local Ruby on Rails environment as being similar with the USA scenario of late 2004 or 2005. We are around 2 years behind them. There’s only 2 or 3 books written and published here. There’s dozens in the USA. We have maybe half a dozens small companies betting on Rails, while there are already hundreds in the USA. Their conferences gather hundreds of people all over the year. We are still struggling to have a small one here. So, this is not a very friendly environment and anyone that wants to play with Rails here will find a blank canvas. This is bad for anyone that wants the traditional corporate ‘career’ but maybe a good window of opportunity for entrepreneurs. Some people started their own businesses around Ruby and Rails and are doing fairly well. Some people are teaching, which is also good because they are graduating the next generation. This is a very fertile soil that needs more seeds. We do what we like to do, not what we are told to do, and that’s important. It’s not only about the ideology of going against the status quo, it’s about being pragmatic and do what matters to you. It’s about gathering around smart people, about improving your own skills. The Ruby community here has these conditions. Evans Data recently ran a world-wide poll and measured that Ruby/Rails interest is rising fast in Brazil, so programmers already know what ‘Ruby’ stands for and lots of them are interested to see what’s behind it. They predict that until next year Brazil will be only behind China around the emergent countries, interest-wise. Big companies don’t have interest in Ruby or Rails here. There are always exceptions, but the majority don’t. They want to protect their old investments in old technologies, the old contracts and negotiations, and they just won’t switch. They are for sale to the highest bidder and Rails is not backed by any company. So there’s no big campaigns, no aggressive marketing. That’s how the market has always worked here and Rails is not reason enough to change that. Not just yet.

Jamie (UK)>> Ruby/Rails is a popular tool in the UK and it continues to expand every day, it’s not going to dwindle in popularity any time soon, that’s for sure.

Jamis (USA)>> I’m in the USA, and Ruby (particularly Rails) is taking the industry by storm. Adoption continues to balloon. It’s a great time to be learning Ruby and Rails.

Jens (Switzerland)>> There’s a small but growing community that meets regularly - Swiss Ruby User Group and Ruby on Rails Switzerland User Group. There’s a lot of projects around and all I know are swamped with work. Most customers don’t care about the technology used, but about the results - and that we can deliver.

Juanjo (Spain)>> Ruby/Rails is getting popular in Spain. It is used in some of the more popular Spanish webs and there are a couple of companies using only Rails for all their projects. There are also a good number of freelancers, so we have a nice small growing community with even a big event every year in the Spanish Rails Conference.

Julian (Netherlands)>> Depends on the country, really. In Russia, where I come from, Ruby is a _superminority_ language - you gotta be a real freak to try to find a job doing Ruby. There’s a couple of translated books out, and there are a few companies doing Rails jobs, but don’t expect anything stellar (or fast) in the market if you go looking for a job. Ruby generalists are not welcome, but if you can wield the Rail you stand a chance (at least in the capital). There is some progress on the outsourcing scene - but it works only if you accept outsourcing as a practice. A major roadblock are people using Windows for development (you have to be ready to accept it’s shortcomings when you go doing code, and they aren’t). But ultimately if you are good in what you do and you got a year - two years of experience under your belt [the](http://novemberain.com/) [right](http://getalime.ru/) [people](http://www.rubybrothers.ru/) will find their ways to you. Here in the Netherlands is much better, with a few companies that do Ruby and Rails with class. There’s Fingertips, there’s Holder - and they are good folks. The experience of working together with Fingertips was nothing but stellar, for instance. I’d say that you can find a job doing Rails/Ruby full time here and not be held back by the public attitude, there are companies that need you and you’ll find your way when your time has come. We don’t have a RUG as such, but we do have “Coffee meetings” where anyone might just drop along and chitchat about his latest Ruby musings with others. I never attended because they always schedule it for 9 in the morning, I’m mostly nocturnal and never get there. But you should (if you are in the premises, that is). Granted, still not the level of the US but you have the Internet for that. The only thing I miss is a hardcore group in the style of Seattle.rb, I think.

Manik (India)>> One thing for which I am extremely happy is that Rails has encouraged developers to come out of these big organizations or code factories and startup on their own. There are a lot of startups in India doing Rails work today. Though we have always had excellent developers in India, but most of them were working for the larger companies. Most of these developers actually never contributed to Open Source as it was something that wasn’t encouraged by these big companies. As a result India was always more popular as an outsourcing destination, pitching more on cost arbitrage rather than technical proficiency of the developers. Rails has given developers a chance to come out of that “outsourcing and cheap resource” branding and assert their identity as good developers. We see a lot more people contributing to Open Source projects from India now. Rails has given them much more visibility as well. Financially also, good Rails developers are doing well. And there is a strong and growing demand for more developers. To give an idea of the demand, we at VinSol have been receiving Rails training requests at such a consistent rate that we have setup a dedicated training page on our website. We recently did a corporate training in Bangalore, and we have companies from Chandigarh, Hyderabad and even Colombo in the pipeline.

Matt (Australia)>> Ruby’s gaining in popularity as a scripting and “glue” language for systems admins, taking up much the same niche as Perl, as well as really taking off with Rails. There’s no shortage of Rails work out there if you want it, too.

Mislav (Croatia)>>Nil. There is interest because of the hype, but I only know several people that actually continued to use it in the work place. I haven’t met all of them personally (although I would like to!), but I’m still unable to count even 10 people that are working with Rails professionally in Croatia. Rails is not a young technology, but companies here aren’t exactly agile. Even if you find a company where you will be allowed to use the tools of your choice, there is low chance that your co-workers will agree. I’ve worked at 2 companies where, over the course of months, my co-workers still weren’t able to understand anything I wrote. Learning a new technology that has the potential of replacing the things you used in the past isn’t something that will happen by destiny or chance; you have to be willing to take the plunge.

Ola (Sweden)>> This is actually kind of hard for me to tell, since I don’t live in Sweden anymore. Ruby and Rails is definitely gaining traction, but it’s going quite slow. Uptake in the US have in the general been much quicker than in Europe and Sweden is no exception. Of course, there are some companies and individuals in all major cities doing Ruby work and from what I’ve seen it’s growing very quickly. There is lots of interest and several courses about Ruby have been held so I think the situation will soon change.

Pedro (Portugal)>> Ruby, especially because of RubyOnRails is just starting in Portugal. The market and projects have been primarily dominated by Perl and PHP on the internet project levels, and Java and other “heavy” languages for the business oriented development.

Peter (UK)>> Here in the UK there are a couple of Ruby user groups, the most notable being the London Ruby Users Group. Generally, however, I am not involved with any local Ruby or Rails efforts, as when you’re online the whole world is accessible to you. Blogs, mailing lists, and IRC channels mean that you don’t need to do things locally, although there are clearly a lot of people interested in that side of things.

Remco (Netherlands)>> The Dutch Ruby scene is very loosely coupled. The only two reoccurring get-togethers I know of are the Morning Coffee Meetings in Amsterdam initiated by the guys at Fingertips and the yearly RubyEnRails conference.

Sau (Singapore)>> Ruby is very little known in Singapore outside of Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails in Singapore is a fledgling, fringe technology that is gaining tremendous traction in recent months. The Singapore Ruby Brigade is the main Ruby user group in Singapore and has been around for about 1.5 years. It’s a very informal group of people, with a core of 10 - 20 people but an extended group of maybe up to 150 people. We meet every last Thursday of the month, usually at a venue sponsored by the local library, where we come together to talk and just get to know other Rubyists. With the recent code::XtremeApps 24-hour programming competition, there has been an increase in the awareness of Rails amongst the software industry in Singapore as well as the undergraduate community.

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