The San Francisco Bay Area is the world's premiere tech hub. While other cities have seen growth over the past decade, there is still no major city that can challenge the Bay Area. Below are a list of resources to help you keep up with all the latest Ruby on Rails developments--key meetups to attend, top companies and coworking spaces, and intensive Rails bootcamps.
SF Rails Meetups
The largest Ruby on Rails related meetup in the world, SF Ruby has more than 6,000 members and has held more than 500 events. With talks, hack nights, and mixers happening weekly, SF Ruby is a great way to get involved.
Sponsored by Zendesk and One Kings Lane among others, SF Rails is a meetup that consistently holds pair programming hack sessions and talks. With every talk starting with Pizza/Beer/Networking, the tone is focused but casual.
The East Bay Ruby Meetup Group hosts 1,689 members and meets every third Tuesday of the month. Organized by the UC Berkeley RadLAB, this Ruby on Rails meetup has a focus on technical and informational postings.
SF Ruby on Rails Training
The job of any intensive Rails program is to have job offers lined up for its students when they finish. After this 9-week program, 88% of devs had job offers, and the average salary was an impressive $79,000.
App Academy differs from many other Rails bootcamps by focusing on "lab-based" interactions. More than 90% of every day is spent building projects, and pair-programming is used to maximize productivity and help students learn from each other.
A 12-week program that meets from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. six days a week, Hack Reactor markets itself as a "Coding Academy for Honors Students." 100% of graduates work as Rails devs and earn an average $85,000 a year.
SF Companies Using Rails
An agile software development firm that works with companies like Groupon and Twitter, Pivotal Labs has been an industry leader for more than two decades. Their go-to framework for web-based projects? Ruby on Rails.
From its Y Combinator beginnings, Scribd has grown to become the "YouTube for documents." All users have the power to upload documents, and Scribd makes it easy to share and embed them across the web.
Gumroad is a company that gives people who create digital and physical goods a direct avenue to sell them through the internet. Its simplicity has the potential to radically change the way payment over the internet is handled by individuals.
SF Coworking Spaces
Built around the values of collaboration, openness, community and accessibility, Citizen Space is a coworking space with a wide range of residents. With five membership options, there's a plan for every kind of dev.
A coworking space that also holds 120 classes and 150 events a year, PARISOMA works to cultivate an environment that helps its residents succeed. The combination of open space and private desks and offices offers the benefits of coworking and minimizes the costs.
With an offer to visit and a free day pass, Hatch Today wants to guarentee the tenants who stay enjoy the space. Home to over 100 companies, HatchToday has a great variety of startups, designers and devs.