MemeRocket » marketing

Eastern US is Fertile Ground for Ruby Development

Bill Burcham — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 22:53:08 +0000

Eastern US Ruby Jobs and Consultancies

As I was perusing jobs on Rubynow I thought I was seeing a concentration of jobs in Florida, New England, and the Washington DC area. To test the idea a little, I decided to throw a sampling of the recent jobs onto a map (see Ruby on Jobs and Consultancies »). To that map I also added some of my favorite Ruby consultancies:

ENTP (Portland, OR)
Hashrocket (Jacksonville Beach, FL)
Intridea (Washington, DC)
Planet Argon (Portland, OR)
thoughtbot (Boston, MA)
Thought Propulsion (Portland, OR) « hey that’s me »
Viget (Falls Church, VA)

If you look at the whole (world) map I think you will agree that there is a definite concentration of Ruby jobs and kickass consultancies in the Eastern US. There are many biases at work here of course, especially when it comes to the consultancies I’ve listed. Nevertheless, it does seem like something’s going on here.

I’m intrigued by a few points:

What’s going on down there in Florida? Seems like I see lots of Ruby jobs down there.

What’s up with that DC area. I’d say the presence of Intridea and Viget within what, 10 miles of each other qualifies DC as a hotbed.

Look at that New England cluster. I think there is general awareness a big presence in New York, but the number of jobs in New England surprised me.

What is it about the Eastern US that makes it such fertile ground for Ruby? Is there some bias in the job listings on Rubynow? Or is this simply a reflection of Ruby moving into the enterprise. Is there a particular kind of enterprise that’s predominant in the East and that’s adopting Ruby technology?

Xerox, The Re-Branding

Bill Burcham — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:06:18 +0000

Chris Griego got it right when he said:

Before, I would hear Xerox and think of copiers. Now, I hear Xerox and think of copiers and awful logos.

Simple Good, Complex bad… Or Vice-Versa?

Bill Burcham — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 22:43:11 +0000

In a recent article, Joel on software claims that simplicity is overrated, that users want more features, and the single thing his company does to drive more sales is to release a new version of an existing product with more features. What’s notable is that a week earlier, he wrote this well-circulated post lambasting Microsoft for having too much choice in the shutdown menu in Vista, and advocated for a simple, one-button shutdown solution.

I wonder if his users really want new features, or just a new release. It would be interesting to compare if the adoption of new releases is in any way related to the feature set of that new release — in the one extreme case, if you sold a new version of your software with just a new version number, would that alone drive sales up. (If only once…)

The other extreme case is also interesting — what if you silently added features to your product, but never explicitly made a new release. Web software-as-service is like this — what version of gmail do you use? None of the google services even display a version number (other than “beta”) anywhere, at least that I can find. They seem to do OK.