How large is the Rails community?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Does anyone have an idea how many professional Rails developers are out there at the moment? Is it tens of thousands? Hundreds? I know it is way more than thousands, because RailsConf sells out every year, and that's just the US. I'm procrastinating from writing a proposal, where I want to give a rationale for using Rails, and the width and depth of the developer community is a tremendous selling point. I'd like to quantify it without completely making something up.

Thanks,

Walter

2

I LMGTFY and found rails slipping in favor of angular

3

IME, conferences are more for marketers than developers. That said, a lower bound can be obtained using the unique author count on the git repository, which, as of now, is 4465, given by 'git log --pretty=format:'%an' | sort | uniq | wc -l' on most Unix systems. A more accurate count can be obtained by checking out some popular plugins and summing up their counts as well. It'll still be an undercount, but it may work for your purposes. Just be sure to place your method in your slides. -- H