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.

Robby tells the story of how he accidentally created Oh My Zsh for the freeCodeCamp podcast. In it, he talks about how Oh My Zsh originated in 2009 after learning the wonders of zsh and collaborating with other developers on different .zshrc configurations. So after numerous attempts at talking his peers into moving to Zsh, he packaged up his .zshrc configuration into a collection of smaller files and added them to Github. The rest is history. The episode even features its very own "Mean Tweets" edition ~11 minutes in.

Not the listening type? You can read the original article here.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Robby and Corinne joined the Ruby on Rails Podcast to chat with host Kyle Daigle about the 2018 Ruby on Rails community survey.

They discussed some of the surprising and interesting findings from this year’s survey – including how many people in the community find devise and ActiveRecord frustrating.

What else was surprising? The stats uncovered on continuous integration. For Kyle, it was surprising how many Rails developers aren’t using any continuous integration tools at all. We’ve primarily used Solano at Planet Argon (along with Bitbucket Pipelines) but we’re in the minority. The stats we found made us wonder if we should consider other tools that the community is using.

And that’s one great thing about the public results of the Rails survey. You’re able to see what your peers are doing and using and re-evaluate if you haven’t considered your options in a while.

We won’t spoil some of the other discussion points, but click here to check out the full podcast. We hope you enjoy the conversation!