Here in Phoenix, our Java user group is one of the oldest in the country, going back almost a decade. Also, no one wears a suit to a Java user group, except the recruiters. There’s always a few of those at every meeting. Topics tend to be much more enterprisey and usually not as “fun” as a Ruby user group presentation but I guarantee you, there are people doing interesting things with Java technology at those meetings just as there are interesting people doing interesting things with Ruby at a RUG meetup. Java conferences are also geek fests of the first order. Are people hacking on RSpec and Rails plugins? No, but they’re geeking out about cool VM optimizations and interesting distributed database problems. Not Ruby/Rails, but still 100% geek cred worthy. Some of us even play both sides. I’ll be presenting at this year’s Java One on 2 different JRuby topics. So Rubyists have successfully infiltrated that camp at least and they’re generally pretty happy to have us.

Do I prefer the JUG to the RUG? No, I attend my RUG every month and the JUG about 4 times a year. That’s mainly due to the fact that I’ve been a full time Ruby dev for almost 3 years now, so obviously my interests lie less in Java and more in Ruby. But don’t write off other communities. Our JUG gets more women every month than our RUG has ever had in its entire existence.

The best way to ensure that it does is to become active in the community and to help others as we all scale the learning curves to our goals. As you advance from new-to-Ruby status to intermediate status and beyond be sure to pay the help and Ruby love you receive forward. I think the Ruby community is particularly inspiring because a lot of the folks involved have given a lot of themselves without expecting much in return and have done their best to foster and encourage folks new to programming to realize that programming is empowerment.

I was really fortunate to make an online friend who was also interested in Ruby/Rails and Flex and he’s been a major encouragement and source of inspiration to me. I’m pretty sure I’d have given up at various points if it hadn’t been for his constant reassurance that I was on a good path. The social movement aspect of Ruby is really important.

I’ve been to RailsConf in Portland the past two years and while I can’t afford to go this year, I would if I could, though I’m not hot on in being in Vegas either. Aside from the amazing offering of presentations of myriad topics, it’s amazing to meet other Rubyists and chat in the hallways. In fact, I ditched several sessions and just hung out talking to people… it was awesome to hear about what folks were passionate about and hear about their personal projects.

I met the cool dude who presented State Machines at your meetup/RUG at this past year’s RailsConf and I love his attitude and admire his willingness to share knowledge and help out. I met a number of folks with this same attitude and that alone was worth the price of admission to RailsConf and the effort it took to get there.

Matz’s desire to make life better and empower us through a great language will always remain baked-in to Ruby, regardless of what “industry/enterprise”-types say or do. It’s up to us to keep the flame alive.

A particularly good way to do this is to start your own meetup or hackfest. We have a very nice Ruby Hackfest group in San Jose, and while attendance is spotty, the folks who show up are amazing. I’ve made some really great friends by being willing to sit in a coffee shop for a few hours once a week to work on my projects. It’s really all about sharing our knowledge and helping lift each other up.

You might consider finding a Ruby/Rails book that you think would be good to work through and set up something akin to a “book club” to work through the book together. I’ve found that to be helpful.

Also, you have my e-mail address so send me an e-mail and I’ll give you more of my contact info. If you have questions or need help I’ll do what I can to help you. You’re already demonstrating that you have the right attitude and I’d like to do what I can to ensure that you succeed.

And although I not a meta-programming, core-contributing, BDD ninja Rubyist, I have been working with it for several months and I’ve also had a watchful eye on the community for three and a half years. I have seen more people working together and sharing resources and helping each other than I’ve ever seen (or heard of) in communities surrounding other languages. With that said, I’m also only 27 and I haven’t been watching other communities closely. It could be that Java has a great community as well (or perhaps it used to in its earlier years), I wouldn’t know. But I’ve heard that Ruby and Rails has an unusually awesome community, and I’ve experienced that so I’m prone to gloat about it

@CLR hehe! First impressions can be wild! I loved the meeting, and it’s worth paying a babysitter to be able to come out to it each month. Expect to see more of me!

I don’t know what it is that makes connecting with other devs feel so damn warm and fuzzy, but I like it.

That may be the first time I’ve ever been called “soft spoken.” I will have to relish this moment. (^_^)

IMO, this community will persist beyond Ruby. Languages will come and go, users will come and go, but the magic of people standing in relation to each other in a group like this is something that is inherently human, something that once you have a taste, you don’t want to go without. That notion is the impetus behind PROGMATICA, which is a language-agnostic group of software engineers here in Portland, Maine.

Thanks so much for coming to the meeting, Renae! It’s always great to experience the energy and ideas that new people bring to the community.

As Evan said, I think that the regional confs are going to become the place to go, and then it will break down to the sub-regional conferences or the more unique ones that will garner the attention. FutureRuby really has me piqued, even if I can’t go because of money constraints.

Stick with us, Ruby is wonderful and the community is incredible, that is not going away.

Totally worth it.

I’ll say it again: Ruby DCamp in Sept ‘09.