It gave me a flashback to 2007, when I was a hobbyist programmer and signed up for a Ruby meetup on a whim, and a recruiter called me 5 minutes later and ended up getting me my first programming job. Crazy to think how much that changed my life.

I started the Portland Ruby meetup back in '02. IIRC we had 4 people including myself in that first meeting at a pub. And it went that way for several years where we'd never have more than about 6 people (and often less). Then after Rails hit it took off. I Haven't been to one in at least a decade.

Interestingly, Sydney does not seem to have an event listed on this site when I checked. Adelaide and Auckland lead the charge, with an occasional Melbourne meetup.

As an aside, I dislike the strong association between Rails and Ruby. Ruby can be a fun scripting language. In my experience I'm generally about as productive writing Ruby as I am with writing Python, but Ruby seems to get bucketed into a very Rails centric world of "not the worst choice you could make if you wanted to make a web service" (at least when it comes to meetups).

Maybe it's just that the web service guys are more likely to need a support group! :)