The economy as a whole might be slow, but the Ruby on Rails sector of the tech economy seems to be on fire. One measure is how much money vendors spend on t-shirts at conference like this one.
Back in the late 90s, I remember a relatively small O’Reilly Perl conference where about two dozen different vendors were handing out t-shirts with abandon (Sun was giving handsful of OpenOffice shirts to each person, instead of one shirt at a time). The next year, after the tech bubble burst, not a single free t-shirt.
This year at RailsConf, t-shirts are back. I think there are six vendors giving away shirts, and most of them are pushing them on anyone who even walks near their display, even if they already have a shirt in their hand.
Consider this a leading economic indicator
Charles Engelke's Blog 
[…] hall and get some snacks. The hall was pretty big and there were lots of t-shirt giveaways, just like at RailsConf. I still view this as a tech economy indicator. For at least open source related efforts, […]
Pingback by First OSCON Afternoon « Charles Engelke’s Blog — July 23, 2008 @ 7:50 pm
[…] a view blog posts on the “economic t-shirt index” on by Laura Thomson and another by Charles Engelke. Both posts talk about how the amount of t-shirts that are given away at tech conferences is a good […]
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