Why you should start learning Ruby on Rails today!

Ruby on Rails is at a very good place right now. It recently celebrated its 5^th anniversary and it’s a point where lots of folks are taking it very seriously to build businesses on top of it, if compared to Java, C#/.NET and PHP. I’m not discussing about the technical merits of the language, which is definitely a separate topic, but about the perceived value by entrepreneurs, enterprises, investors and others.

However, RoR has a big problem. The numbers of developers who are versed on it are tiny and the demand is growing, which will put even more pressure on salaries, recruiter’s fees and businesses bottlenecks.

I don’t have an explanation why (relatively) so few developers are picking up RoR skills, but if I was looking on how to improve my developing skills for the development needs of tomorrow, Ruby on Rails would be my first choice.

Just take a look at the Seattle 2.0 Job Board. About 30% of all developer positions are for RoR developers. Job Boards like 37Signals charges a cool $400 per post for 30 days. Yet, most of the startups in Seattle who are building on RoR, independent of their stage, have a hard time find developers and the collective of these startups will require hundreds of RoR developers over the coming years. Where are these developers coming from?

At the same time, universities and colleges are always many years behind in teaching new technologies because it takes time for the professors themselves to learn new technology, and Ruby is at the exact point where the technology is mature enough that lots of businesses want to use, but not old enough is taught in school.

Ruby on Rails has mostly been associated with Startups, but medium and large size companies are picking up on it. WhitePages.com, a 120-person company, migrated to Ruby over the last few years. I heard from friends that Ruby is making strides inside of Amazon.com and many internal tools are being built on Ruby. If you are a developer and you are looking to learn something new, Ruby is a great place.

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