Last Friday, me and some folks from the Minho Ruby Brigade went to the very first Coimbra.rb meetup.
It was a great event with lots of Rubyists sharing their enthusiasm for the language. This popped a question on my mind: is the Portuguese Ruby Community entering it's renaissance?
Almost a year has gone by since Zamith and I created the Minho.rb meetup. At that time we felt the need to discuss what was happening in the Ruby world, as well as revamping the northern Ruby community.
Since Rubynorte, there were no events related to the topic. Sure there were some random meetups, but nothing recurrent, with a community behind it.
A few months later, Porto.rb was created, and now there's also Coimbra.rb. And if you go even more to the south, to Lisbon, there's also Ruby LX, which precedes Minho.rb.
Looking back, we can see that Ruby, after it's own renaissance with the creation of Ruby on Rails, has been a notorious presence in the Portuguese tech scene. We have communities dating back to 2006 such as Ruby.PT, or even less active groups as Ruby on Rails Portugal.
I truly believe that Ruby is becoming a well established language in Portugal, that needs even more talented and skilled people joining the community, which I hope this renaissance of meetups and tech events will help to achieve.
As a Minho.rb founder, I can assure you we'll double down our efforts in order to augment and improve the community, both in size and overall quality.
We'll do this by creating bigger and better meetups and events, as well as contributing as much as possible with code, presentations, books or even blog posts like this.
And to kick it off, we're thinking about organising a conference in 2014.
What do you guys think of that?