I think it's because RoR allows one developer to make an app quickly while .NET is more for a team. If you're someone who needs only one developer for your Rails app - because you were the only developer and have to move on to do something else or your current developer is leaving, you are more likely to tolerate his not being onsite if you can give him high level instructions; however, a remote team is much complicated to handle.
I'm not sure I that I agree with this. I've worked on plenty of projects utilizing ASP.NET during my days as a freelancer where I was the only developer. However, it might be that this is primarily a perception problem, where the types of companies using .NET simply prefer to have their team on-site, as opposed to companies utilizing RoR which may be younger and more forward-thinking, resulting in them being more open to remote workers.
Yeah, I agree with this. Been contemplating whether to invest time in learning RoR for a while now, though I've also been using ASP.NET for over a decade now, and leaving the Microsoft ecosystem would be a drastic change for me.
I've tried doing this by practicing NodeJS lately... But it looks like I need to publish code in GitHub to prove that I'm not a charlatan. It's rough doing that in addition to a job and a side project though
Why don't you find a way to work Node into your side project? If you modularize what you build in node nicely, you can break it out into its own repo and post it. :)
Also, I personally take advantage of failed side projects from the past by open sourcing them. Really helps in interviews!
Yea I'll find a way of doing that ultimately. The last thing I wrote in Node was for internal use for the company I work for. No way of putting that on GitHub!