Rails Business

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 outage that set it off, and how they made Christmas Day 2025 a success. LINKS - Andrew's Book - Andrew's Newsletter - Scaling Rails at Aura Frames: Splitting to 8 Primary DBs and Reaching #1 in the App Store - From Christmas Outage to #1 Ap...

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, and why that's the same lesson object-oriented programming taught us years ago. - Where skills end and agents begin — plus a surprise from Brendan's code review setup, where the sub-agents it spun up weren't using the skill at all. - Ryan's ...

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 markets instead of cozy niches AI can replicate overnight.Automating entire roles with agentic "employees" — Cursor Cloud Agents and Grok Bot wired into MCPs for support, compliance, infra, finance and dev.Why most jobs are really just cron jobs, and how far one ...

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 covered include: - Why design has started outselling development at Flagrant. - Why accessibility and UX are the parts people forget, and how Flagrant's hiring process mirrors real work to surface the thing that matters most: communication. - Plus ...

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 objective, tool-callable checks an agent can loop against — N+1s, characterization tests, jemalloc — instead of shipping more unreviewed slop. Nate makes the case that the future looks like Intercom's "software factory" (tiny, automatically-verified PR...