I spoke with a recruiter recently, in an attempt to get a feel for the marketability of Ruby skills in my area. He hadn’t heard of any Ruby jobs that were available, but he did have one that called for Groovy on Grails. I have heard of this technology in the past, but didn’t know what it was. After a bit of research it seems to be language and convention-over-configuration framework that runs on the JVM, very similar to Ruby. So this has gotten me wondering if focusing on Ruby would be a mistake. Judging by the number of resources I encountered for each during my brief investigation, I’d say that Groovy doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as popular as Ruby. But if there is a job market for Groovy over Ruby in my area, perhaps I should be looking there instead.
Of course, it would be foolish to change my entire career path on such a minor and anecdotal conversation. If I get out of this missed deadline hole I’ve dug for myself at work, I’ll have to research the topic more seriously. I’m new to both, so I’m thinking that I’ll still lean toward the tech with more free tutorials and resources available. I have such a backlog of codeschool lessons and youtube videos to watch, I don’t think I’ll ever catch up.
In related news, I have decided against developing on Dreamhost’s version of Ruby/Rails. They are extremely old (Rails 3.03, anyone?) and I can’t upgrade them on the shared hosting I have. I’ll look at getting some dedicated Ruby hosting once I have something worth sharing.