[LRUG] Rails Cities

[Murray Steele]

Last night, via prompting from Martin Sadler, I mentioned
http://railscities.com/ at the end of the meeting.  In the pub most people
said I should repeat it on the list as no-one took much note of the
specifics in the mad dash to get outside and grab a cooling pint.

Rails Citites pulls the list of the top 100 most popular rails coders from
Working With Rails (http://www.workingwithrails.com/browse/popular/people)
and then collates the cities these top 100 work in and ranks them in order
of the cities with the most programmers.  Currently London is 3rd, which is
a shocking state of affairs as far as I'm concerned.  To beat Sanfrancisco
(currently 2nd with 7 folk), we only need 8 folk in the top 100 and we
already have 6 and to beat Jacksonville we need 10 folk to beat their 9.
This shouldn't be too hard, there are regularly more than 80 people at our
meetings, surely at least 10 of us are good enough to be in the top 100.

I went and wrote an hpricot script to:

a) find the lower threshold for the top 100,
b) find everyone that claims to be from London,
c) find their recommendation count,
d) spit out a list of those close to the threshold that we should vote for.

I ran this script this morning and these are my findings:

The current threshold for the top 100 is 28 recommendations, and it seems to
move quickly as last week it when I originally wrote the script it was only
25.  So we have to give people enough recommendations to ensure them a long
stay in the top 100.

Already in top 100:

Pratik Naik (76 recs) -
http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/5424-pratik-naik
Dan Web (55 recs) - http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/5127-dan-webb
Luke Redpath (44 recs) -
http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/5150-luke-redpath
James Adam (31 recs) -
http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/5137-james-adam
Danilo Sato (30 recs) -
http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/7530-danilo-sato
Martin Sadler (29 recs) -
http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/5152-martin-sadler

Close to top 100:

Rob McKinnon (24 recs) -
http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/5876-rob-mckinnon
James Cox (23 recs) - http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/7223-james-cox
Carlos Villela (21 recs) -
http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/6751-carlos-villela

Less close to top 100:

Murray Steele (17 recs) -
http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/5430-murray-steele
Damien Tanner (13 recs) -
http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/8154-damien-tanner
Tom Ward (12 recs) - http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/5173-tom-ward
Jonathan Conway (11 recs) -
http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/5146-jonathan-conway
James Darling (10 recs) -
http://www.workingwithrails.com/person/5443-james-darling

There's then a serious long tail of us Londoners with <10 recommendations
(there's 217 in the list total), but I figured that 10 should be the lower
bound or this email would be even more needlessly long.

There's an angel on my left shoulder saying; "Don't try to game the system,
just go to WWR and recommend people you actually have worked with / used
code by / seen present / read blogs of / etc... People that you really do
think are good developers.  Everything should work out for the best if we do
it naturally.  And you know what?  Being the 3rd best city for rails
programmers isn't so bad, we're still beating Chicago!"

There is however a much louder devil on my right shoulder saying; "Screw
that, game the system.  We must be at the top of this ranking on the
internet! You've already written the script to get the data, might as well
use it!"

I'm undecided as of yet, maybe you lot aren't.

Muz

ps.  There's also http://railscompanies.com/ too.
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