What the Rails Hosting survey says about the Ruby on Rails community
Some highlights, or anyway things that caught my eye, when I read the 2009 Rails Hosting survey of Ruby on Rails developers:
- Around 60% of the community has been using Ruby and Ruby on Rails for 2 years or more. It’s not yet a mature community, but there is now a reasonably large body of expertise to draw from in solving problems in and around the framework.
- Rails developers on average develop two to five new applications per year, and deploy them several times a week to several times a week.
- Most of these are probably small:
- Generally respondents either self-host or use a small-scale VPS service like Slicehost (which I myself host this blog on; recommended.)
- Respondents claim to be highly sensitive to the price of their hosting provider.
- Most don’t use performance, uptime, or process monitoring.
- It surprised me to see that almost a quarter don’t use any automated deploy process whatsoever, which sounds painful. Furthermore, 5% claimed they were still using FastCGI+Apache. Crazy.
- The community has largely moved over to Git as the SCM of choice, although Github is not widely used as a centralized code repository—only a third claim that their source code is hosted there.
- Passenger has, this year, finally surpassed Mongrel as the rails server of choice.
I see a community that’s still youthful but is starting to mature. I’m still proud to be a Ruby developer, and glad to be a part of the community. Here’s hoping for more good years ahead.