ITConversations has just made David’s OSCON 2005 keynote, Secrets Behind Ruby on Rails, available for download.

One of the big stories for Rails in August was the numbers behind its budding ecosystem. The conference fell right around Rails’ first anniversary and the numbers one year in were promising. Today, six months down the road, they keep going up.

In the year between when Rails was released and the OSCON 2005 keynote, it was downloaded 100,000 times. In the six months since then it’s up to 300,000.

Estimates on the Rails wiki in August indicated that there were no fewer than 250 programmers in 36 countries getting payed to work professionally with Rails. There are now over 550 Rails programmers in 50 countries, including Azerbaijan!

When Agile Web Development with Rails was released it sold 6 thousand books in its first run. Six months later, its sales are over 25 thousand. Rails publishing is busy, with even more titles upcoming, such as the Rails Recipes cookbook, which is scheduled to be available in beta sometime this February.

There are now around 400 people in the #rubyonrails IRC channel, about the same as #php. The Rails mailing list is as busy as ever.

Six months from now? The first annual Rails Conference. The next half year promises to be interesting. See you there.