We recently had a roundtable discussion in a company meeting about our developers writing content for our blog and outside sites. It's something we all agreed we want to do more of, but for a variety of reasons, hadn't been able to do as much as we'd like. There were certain reasons I expected – time, for example. It's been a busy summer for Planet Argon! But one reason surprised me: fear.

There's an inherent vulnerability that comes with documenting your thoughts and putting them out into the wild on the internet. In an era of relative anonymity, it's easy to tear down someone's viewpoint that you don't agree with.

Since this was a recent topic we had discussed, I enjoyed reading Flavio Copes' article for freeCodeCamp about "filling a developer bucket". What does that mean? It means contributing something positive to the community that expresses gratitude or makes someone feel good. The idea is that we all start out the day with an empty bucket. When we wrap up for the day, we want that bucket to be filled – with satisfaction that we've done meaningful work.

Flavio discusses some ways to "fill" buckets:

• Send a thank you to someone who has helped you out
• Provide constructive feedback on a Github project
• Send a PR to fix a little thing in a library

There are a million ways to add a drop in someone else's bucket. Internally on our team, we've made an effort to make gratitude a part of our culture. There are always ways to improve this, and making an effort to do this for people outside of our team is definitely something we could always do better.

Check out Flavio's article above for a bit of inspiration on filling someone else's bucket. As he mentions, "It's always harder to fill a bucket than to empty it," but the end result of a little bit of effort is always worth it.

It's been a busy couple of months for Robby on the podcast front. This week, he talks with Chad Pytel, the CEO of Thoughtbot and host of Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast. Thoughtbot is in the same realm of Planet Argon as a development consultancy – but as you'll find out during the interview, we're quite different than we seem on the surface. In this episode, Robby also discusses how his role has shifted within Planet Argon over the last 14 years, what has changed (and not changed) over 10 years of Rails survey results, and how Rails fits into the ever-shifting ecosystem of web development frameworks.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

You’ve read it. I’ve read it. We’ve all read it somewhere. On a good day, Rails is a dying language, and on a bad day it’s already dead. But is that really the case? And what's that statement even based on? This article details an interesting bit of research done by Yoel Blum on the demand for Ruby on Rails developers. And if you think Rails developers aren’t in demand, you might be surprised by the findings.

He had previously written about the decline in popularity of Rails, and mentioned Laravel, Django, and Express.JS as comparably popular frameworks. This previous piece was based on StackOverflow questions asked over time – which is not necessarily the best measure of a framework’s popularity.

Yoel researched the number of job openings posted on LinkedIn for various frameworks. Job postings are a seemingly fair measurement of demand for a certain skill set. So how in demand were Ruby on Rails developers?

In the United States, Rails was the second most mentioned framework in job descriptions behind .NET, with 8,710 mentions (For comparison, Asp.NET has 12,203). When you narrow the search down to Silicon Valley, Rails actually comes in ahead of both .NET and Django with over 1,000 job postings at the time of article publication.

Is this data 100% bulletproof in showing the popularity of Rails? Not exactly. One thing I’ve noticed while looking at developer job descriptions is that often more than one framework is mentioned, written like this: Web application development experience in Ruby on Rails or other modern MVC framework (Spring, Backbone.js, etc...). This means there may be some overlap in the data that would take some more digging to uncover.

But these numbers are certainly a promising look at the current state of Ruby on Rails in the broader ecosystem of application development. And it’s a helpful response to the next person that asks you why you’re still using Ruby on Rails. :)

For the rest of Yoel's data findings and conclusions, you can read the full article on Medium.