The other thing which really worked for us: We were getting fed up trying to badger people to help give talks etc (or just doing it ourselves). Completely exhausting. Ended up saying to the community: "this is your meetup, we just help run it. If we don't get 11 speakers for the year we're going to shut it down". We asked in January, got 11 speakers for the year (Dec is social), and we've been doing it like that ever since. Works an absolute treat. You do need to be prepared for no one to step up, in which case, it's sad, but, shut it down. You're not the community, the community is the community!
for it to find it's footing again and grow.
wonderful language, wonderful ecosystem - but the Rails albatross - will be the death of ruby.
It's a Kickstarter for groups that want to feel like they are a club. This helps with the chicken and egg problem.
UK only at the moment but that's easily changed if anyone asked interest elsewhere.
It also helps to have a "boring" framework with strong opinions and strong community standards etc.
I wouldn't claim it to be the best as I'm not sure how you'd measure that, but I can say that in my experience it is letting me build things to a decent standard really rather quickly.
If you're building something new today, I'd generally recommend starting with a framework that you already know. But for those of us who already know Rails, it continues to be a wonderful choice. I'm playing with Phoenix LiveView for some projects, which is letting me build real-time UI's really easily – but they have some real-time requirements which Rails can do but is not it's strength. For anything a little more CRUD, it's a no-brainer.