Ruby Ireland may the code rise to meet you

So with a new site in place, it’s high time to explain a little about Ruby Ireland to the outside world. For those of you new to Ruby Ireland, it’s a community of Ruby enthusiasts scattered around Ireland - and occasionally a few other far flung places on the Earth. It’s aim is simple - to provide it’s members and the public with a place to find out about the Ruby scene in Ireland, share Ruby knowledge and organise events and projects related to Ruby Ireland.

If you’ve never used Ruby then you probably wonder what all the fuss is about. Put simply, it’s a beautiful, elegant and powerful programming language which has helped shape how people and businesses now develop software. Ruby’s Open Source roots and it’s open approach to development has allowed it to revolutionize the approach to testing software as you develop it. Rails, the web framework that helped popularize Ruby, made the entire web development industry question why previous frameworks had to be so complicated, unstructured, untestable and unlovable.

The community of Irish Rubyists is sizable and geographically dispersed. This provides a challenge when organising events and meetups; with Dublin and Cork now having regularly organised Ruby Ireland meetups and a strong interest in Ruby also present in Belfast and other areas. A goal of Ruby Ireland is to help people getting in contact with other Rubyists, both locally and remotely - such people meeting up, businesses getting in touch with potential employees, Ruby companies getting in touch with with other Ruby companies to discuss potential opportunities or areas of collaboration. The main place for all this discussion is currently the Ruby Ireland Google Group. It’s the intention of the new site to help share some of the ideas generated in that forum with the world.

One piece of the puzzle is to know what companies are out there in the Ruby space. If you’re one such company please express your interest and get in contact at our contact details. Getting in touch with the community can help foster ideas and jobs, as well as helping to raise the profile of your company.

Ruby is the language that’s helped a plethora of programmers rediscover the joy in programming. Discover what it can do for you!