Secrets Behind Ruby on Rails: The Numbers
Posted by marcel February 01, 2006 @ 05:50 AM
ITConversations has just made David’s OSCON 2005 keynote, Secrets Behind Ruby on Rails, available for download.
One of the big stories for Rails in August was the numbers behind its budding ecosystem. The conference fell right around Rails’ first anniversary and the numbers one year in were promising. Today, six months down the road, they keep going up.
In the year between when Rails was released and the OSCON 2005 keynote, it was downloaded 100,000 times. In the six months since then it’s up to 300,000.
Estimates on the Rails wiki in August indicated that there were no fewer than 250 programmers in 36 countries getting payed to work professionally with Rails. There are now over 550 Rails programmers in 50 countries, including Azerbaijan!
When Agile Web Development with Rails was released it sold 6 thousand books in its first run. Six months later, its sales are over 25 thousand. Rails publishing is busy, with even more titles upcoming, such as the Rails Recipes cookbook, which is scheduled to be available in beta sometime this February.
There are now around 400 people in the #rubyonrails IRC channel, about the same as #php. The Rails mailing list is as busy as ever.
Six months from now? The first annual Rails Conference. The next half year promises to be interesting. See you there.
Thats a high rejection rate right? :)
This is just the beginning of a bright future. Rails is the Google of the frameworks… time will tell.
I think that is 550 Programmers getting paid for it. I’m sure there are a lot more doing it in their spare time.
AC—note that it is PAID programmers he is listing. Plus there are the inevitable mutiple downloads.
Also, most people will inevitably be lurkers!
Lurkers, or possibly contractually unable to disclose what they’re working on, using whatever technologies.
Why does an open source project have secrets?
Just to piss off anonymous cowards.
Anonymous wrote:
“Why does an open source project have secrets?”
To make the fools wonder.
probably a good number of people who didn’t know about that page on the wiki until just this moment.
Well, if you’re counting every “gem update rails
-include-dependencies” as a “download”, then maybe yeah. If you’re counting Active* gems separatelyl then that’s just cheating.In the past year or so, I’ve downloaded rails on three machines, 3-5 times per machine on average. 9-15 times so far. I think if you divide the 300k with that, you’ll get a sense of how many people have at one time or another played with rails.
20,000 to 30,000 is still a pretty impressive number, some might say not as impressive as 300 thousand.
I think the more important point is that in 1 year after release-
Rails was downloaded 100,000 times; in 6 months after that point-it was downloaded 200,000 times. This is a 200% increase.Even if people are downloading it more than once (I work for a webhosting company and get it using the gem repository for each new general server that goes live, so I download it around 5 times a month), that still doesn’t take back from the fact there is a decent growth in the rate of downloads (i.e., it is increasing not decreasing).