Rails Business
Brendan Buckingham and Ryan Frisch talk about developing with Ruby on Rails and how to leverage it to build a business.
Episodes
43 episodes
Andrew Atkinson
What do you do when the database is maxed out, the busiest day of your year is six months away, and you still don't know what's actually wrong? Andrew Atkinson joins us to talk through that exact scenario at Aura Frames - the Christmas Day 2024...
Claude Skills, Spam, and the Last 10%
No guest this week — just Brendan and Ryan working through several things they've been seeing lately. Topics covered include: - Anthropic's skills: why both of us started by writing one giant skill instead of small composable ones...
Jesse Hanley of Bento
Jesse Hanley joined us from southern Japan, where he runs Bento — an email marketing and transactional email platform — as a company of one. Topics covered include:Why the bootstrapped dream now means picking big, hairy, competitive...
Jim Remsik
Jim Remsik — founder of Flagrant, Madison Ruby and the traveling XO Ruby conferences — joins us for a wide-ranging conversation. The discussion starts with the ups and downs of running a design-and-dev agency in the AI era. Topics c...
Nate Berkopec
Nate Berkopec (Speedshop) returns to dig into what AI actually changes about Rails performance work — and it's not what the hype says. The through-line: stop conflating understanding code with verifying it, because the real leverage is building...
Ryan Castillo
Ryan Castillo returns to talk about pivoting Knowatoa from an SEO play into an AI-visibility tool — and why the analytics everyone wants to track are becoming impossible to trust in an AI-search world. The back half turns into a deep dive on Ry...
Ernesto Tagwerker
Ernesto Tagwerker (FastRuby.io / OmbuLabs) returns to talk through how AI is reshaping both sides of his business — speeding up Rails upgrades while simultaneously eating into revenue, and opening a new lane in AI strategy consulting for non-te...
Colleen Schnettler and Joe Masilotti
Colleen Schnettler and Joe Masilotti (Permission Not Required podcast) join Ryan and Brendan to catch up on what they're each building. Joe walks through Ruby Native — his platform for getting Rails apps i...
Rolling Your Own APM with Claude: Real Wins, Real Tradeoffs
Ryan and Brendan talk through the growing pains of AI-assisted development — including fatigue, increased confidence in bigger code changes, and what happens when you stop paying for expensive APM tools and just build your own. Ryan walks throu...
Scott Werner Returns
Scott Werner (Sublayer) returns to discuss how rapidly AI and agentic coding have is changing. The hosts and Scott dig into why niche tools are increasingly getting replicated by developers and hobbyists with "good enough" custom solution...
Is Data the Moat for Your Business?
The hosts explore whether “data is the new moat” in SaaS and argues that data alone—especially customer data—is rarely defensible as extraction and migration get easier. Instead, moats increasingly come from clear product vision, differentiated...
Do Pull Request Reviews Still Matter in the Age of AI?
The hosts once again discuss the recurring theme of AI’s impact on development workflows. They discuss various topics, including: Increased PR volume from AI-assisted coding and whether traditional pull request reviews ar...
Building with an AI Orchestrator Workflow
In this episode, the hosts discuss building a “universal scraper” for event calendars and a new AI-assisted workflow using a long-running orchestrator.md thread.00:12 Why Change AI Workflow01:29 Orchestrator File Setup04:36 How M...
AI Coding at Scale: Managing PR Overload, Using Claude to Stay Organized and Rethinking SaaS for an AI-First World
The hosts discuss how AI-assisted coding has massively increased their output, creating a new bottleneck: cognitive load, PR review, testing, and getting work shipped. Ryan discusses splitting time between finishing near-complete work, advancin...
Scaling AI-Assisted Development
Today we discuss lessons from our previous episode with John Nunemaker, focusing on the Conductor tool and how multi-workspace, multi-agent workflows can speed up coding and bug fixing. Brendan shares his experimenting with parallelizing six Ro...
John Nunemaker on AI Development
John Nunemaker returns to discuss how fast AI tooling has changed and argues tech leaders should adopt Claude Max (defaulting to Opus), set up agent-friendly local environments, and roll that out to their teams. He shares how his company built ...
Kyle Keesling
In this episode, Kyle Keesling, co-owner of PASS Testing and long-time solo Rails developer, shares how PASS grew from a college web design side project into a niche software and training business for the ...
Reflecting on Our First Year of the Podcast
In this episode, the hosts reconnect after a holiday break to reflect on their podcast journey over the last year. They discuss important milestones like their one-year recording anniversary, the various episodes from the past year, and sharing...
Striving for Ideal Code
In this episode, the hosts discuss reflect on the high-quality, maintainable code found in various videos and books and their own aspirations to emulate such coding standards. The conversation covers the challenges of maintaining good coding pr...
Mateus Pereira
In this episode, we chat with Mateus Pereira from Ombu Labs about the nuances of Rails upgrades and how AI is revolutionizing the process. From tackling gem dependencies to client collaboration, Mateus shares valuable insights and tips for exec...
Nate Berkopec
In this episode, Nate Berkopec, the proprietor of Speedshop, a Ruby on Rails performance consultancy, author of several books including the Complete Guide to Rails Performance, and a maintainer of
Communicating Project Requirements
In this episode, we tackle the nuances of communicating project requirements within development teams. From managing user stories and acceptance criteria to balancing control and flexibility, we explore best practices for ensuring clarity and e...
Stephen Anderson
In this episode, we welcome Stephen Anderson, founder and owner of Bendyworks, a Madison, Wisconsin based Ruby on Rails consultancy. Stephen shares his journey from corporate Java consulting to...