Happy birthday, Copenhagen.rb
I’m a bit late on this, but nevertheless: Last Friday marked the one year anniversary of the first gathering of Ruby and Rails geeks in Copenhagen, that which should later be formalized as the Copenhagen Ruby Brigade.
That initial meeting has been well documented online, both in words and in pictures.
A year, really?
So what has happened since then, I can hear the masses of inquisitive readers ask.
- We have hosted around 10 official meetings – initially in offices around Copenhagen, but lately we have settled in at our gracious hosts, PROSA. The topics covered have been many and varied, from technologies like Puppet over building Gems to question likewhat CMS’s to choose for your Rails applications. And every meeting continues to feature new people.
- We have held informal meetings in bars, hosted a free-for-all hackday, and a 14 hour night of contributing patches to Rails.
- We have been visited by prominent Rubyists like Obie Fernandez, David Black, and David Heinemeier Hansson.
- The pool of Copenhagen.rb images on Flickr has grown a fair deal.
- The mailing list – which is our primary mean of communication – is up to 89 subscribed members.
Ruby adoption in Copenhagen
At the initial meeting, we did a quick poll asking what programming language the crowd present wrote for a living.
- Java, 7 (35%)
- .NET, 7 (35%)
- PHP, 4 (20%)
- Other, 2 (10%)
- Ruby, 0 (0%)
Recently I posted a poll asking not entirely the same question, but rather what language is the primary language of the people on the mailing list. The results paint a quite different now, a year later:
- Ruby, 17 (44%)
- Java, 8 (22%)
- Other, 6 (17%)
- .NET, 3 (8%)
- PHP, 2 (6%)
While this is hardly scientific in any way, or any indication that 44% of all programmers in Copenhagen use Ruby, the numbers are sweet music to my ears. I am thrilled that so many people in our small group have been able to go from wanting to do Ruby to actually naming Ruby their primary programming language (it obviously helps that I am one of them). Being able to work on stuff you like in the language you love is a great motivator.
To infinity and beyond?
I am sure the coming year is going to be even more interesting and prove an even higher adoption rate of Ruby in Copenhagen – and Denmark in general. The number of publicly available, danish Ruby-based projects is steadily increasing and is bound to continue to rise.