Technical founders tend to find joy in coding, not so much in selling. But most times, you need a customer telling you how to make your product better for it to grow. In this conversation with @kateholterhoff.com, Victoria Melnikova, touches PMF, the state of the devtools industry, and AX:

Good Wigs & Golden Paths: Dev Tools in the AI Era with Victoria Melnikova

YouTube video by RedMonk

youtube.com

Our fonts, official logo and all its fun variants, and brand guidelines are live on the website under '/brand'.  If you need to use our logo for anything, e.g., saying great things about us, go and download what you need in SVG or PNG format. The best variation has to be Elvis Martians, for sure.

Not all heroes wear capes... at least the @e18e.dev team doesn't. They’re on a mission to make the JS ecosystem lighter and faster. So we’re donating to them as part of our OSS donation program. They've already reduced node_modules size and made Node.js tooling much faster, and we appreciate it!

Evil Martians@evilmartians.com · last wk.

We’re donating to DOMPurify as part of our open source donation program. DOMPurify, built and maintained by Cure53, is the best tool to protect your website from XSS attacks. They are doing an amazing job at tracking all new potential attacks. We respect and rely on their findings.

The recording of last month's SF Ruby meetup at @gustohq.bsky.social is live! 🚨 Speakers:  - Edward Kim from Gusto  - Madison Sites from @orderco.bsky.social  - Harsh Parekh from VitalSource We ended the session with 60-second on-stage intros.  

SF Ruby Meetup. August 25, 2026 ‪@Gusto with Edward Kim, Madison Sites, and Harsh Parekh

Ruby is behind the Bay Area's most successful tech organizations an...

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Only 15 days left to get tickets at regular price, then price goes up! So we hid a secret single-use 15% OFF coupon in this image. 🔥 Find it, claim it, and get your ticket with a discount today! luma.com/sfrubyconf2026

Shipping skills could soon mean as much as READMEs. As AI writes more, libraries that teach agents to correctly use their APIs will win. Rails Hyperdrive lets gems distribute agent guidance and getting started just takes Markdown files and a gemspec metadata entry. evilmartians.com/chronicles/r...

Rails Hyperdrive: supercharged agentic development for Rails—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog

Introducing Rails Hyperdrive: a development-only Rails engine that gives AI coding agents live answers from your booted app and lets any gem in your bundle ship guidance gated to your Gemfile. Convent...

evilmartians.com

This conference is about celebrating YOU. 💙 So after chatting with a bunch of you, we made three changes to the event: - We changed the name back to SF Ruby Conference. - We updated our keynote speakers because, unfortunately, Garry Tan can't make it anymore. - Day passes are now for sale.

We’re donating to DOMPurify as part of our open source donation program. DOMPurify, built and maintained by Cure53, is the best tool to protect your website from XSS attacks. They are doing an amazing job at tracking all new potential attacks. We respect and rely on their findings.

Evil Martians@evilmartians.com · 2w ago

As part of our OSS donation program, this month we're celebrating @gregberge.com. He’s the maintainer of ~20 OSS projects, including SVGR. SVGR transforms SVG files into React components. It also works with Webpack, Vite, and Next.js.

As part of our OSS donation program, this month we're celebrating @gregberge.com. He’s the maintainer of ~20 OSS projects, including SVGR. SVGR transforms SVG files into React components. It also works with Webpack, Vite, and Next.js.

Evil Martians@evilmartians.com · 2mo ago

We use @devongovett.me's tools across our projects. We particularly rely on React Aria to make our tools accessible. As part of our open source donation program, we donated to Devon to thank him for his work and impact on the community. He's also the creator of Parcel and Lightning CSS.

When we say we want this conference to help build the future of Ruby, we mean it! Our thinking is that if you talk to each other, you'll find repeated problems, come up with ideas to solve them, and build the future that we want/need. This is how we learned about Inertia Rails. 🧵

Agentic development brings real speed, but has broken collaboration. We can pretend, but is sending each other 50-100 PRs a day "teamwork"? @inazarova.bsky.social names the 2 kinds of work we're mixing up and shares 3 collab recipes for getting your human team back. evilmartians.com/chronicles/g...

Give up a little speed, get your team back—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog

Agentic speed turned all of us into super-ICs and broke our ability to collaborate. Two types of work that both produce code, and three recipes for working together again: a safe perimeter for experim...

evilmartians.com

Faced with an ageing codebase, @evilmartians.com migrated to Astro, reusing existing React components, halving page weight, and improving performance. Learn how one engineer did it in just 9 days: astro.build/case-studies...

Affordable and Fast Migration | Astro

How Evil Martians moved from Gatsby to Astro in nine days without rewriting a single React component

astro.build

We've moved from Gatsby to Astro. After years of procrastination, surprisingly, 1 engineer and Claude did it in 2 weeks! 61% less homepage JavaScript, mobile score 66 to 90, page weight 2.1 MB to 1.1 MB. The story, happy engineers, bugs and all: evilmartians.com/chronicles/g...

The Golden Switch, or migrating from Gatsby to Astro in under 9¾ days—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog

367 posts, four years on Gatsby, and no dedicated team: here's how we moved evilmartians.com to Astro in two weeks with an LLM.

evilmartians.com

Join me at @sfruby.com's Startup Conference and get your pixel card too 👾 clouds.sfruby.com/e/2026-bits/...

Aurelie Verrot · San Francisco Ruby Startup Conference

Senior Software Engineer at Zendesk. Joining the San Francisco Ruby Startup Conference on November 10-12, 2026.

clouds.sfruby.com

Last year, @inazarova.bsky.social interviewed Marc Köhlbrugge, founder of BetaList, and Rails enthusiast. In this conversation, Marc said these words and we stand by them. There's a special magic to those who choose Ruby. He also shared how he build in public and what's missing in the ecosystem.

We went to Mars and found that Decagon, @bolt.new, Tines, Teleport, Rails Foundation, Daylight, @gustohq.bsky.social, and Whop were already there. We redesigned our client page and felt immensely proud of our team and the work they do for these amazing companies. Check it out: ourwebsite/clients

We turned SF into our childhood favorite 8-bit game to welcome you to the SF Ruby Conference! @inazarova.bsky.social built The Pier: a special place where you can turn yourself into a cute chibi character, meet other attendees, and collect gems. Join the fun, collect points, and earn rewards.

Gusto runs payroll for 500,000+ businesses on one of the largest Rails monoliths. @inazarova.bsky.social shares why a team so strong hired us for Sidekiq at scale, what running background jobs actually takes at that size & when to stop waiting for the perfect hire. evilmartians.com/chronicles/w...

Why Gusto hired Evil Martians for Sidekiq infrastructure—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog

Gusto runs payroll for 500,000+ businesses on one of the largest Rails monoliths anywhere. Why a team this strong hired Evil Martians for Sidekiq at scale, what running background jobs at that size ac...

evilmartians.com

Our new “co-authors” aren’t responsible for production and won’t be here in 6 months to explain their decisions. That's still on us, only for codebases growing several times faster. Yuri Mikhin shares 10 anti-AI slop checks and tools for frontend projects in 2026. evilmartians.com/chronicles/t...

10 anti-AI slop moves for frontend projects going faster than humans can review—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog

Ten checks that catch what AI-written frontend code hides: contract codegen, boundary linting, mutation testing, and dead-code detectors.

evilmartians.com

The @sfruby.com conf attendees are getting into trouble. We just had to rescue Chris from a building. Vica, Anton, and Alex are happy to see him, @jpcamara.com found the chopper more exciting, and @skryukov.dev doesn't really know what happened. Buy a ticket before Sep 30 and explore SF with them.

Win a ticket to Rails World! This week, if you: - Buy a ticket for the SF Ruby Conference by Aug 30 - Post about it (e.g., "I'm going to SF Ruby, who's coming?") - Tag us You're automatically participating for a free ticket to Rails World. Flight and accommodation not included. See you there!

We're going to Austin, TX with @appsignal.com to host a RailsWorld after hours event. Join us on Sep 23rd at a secret location to enjoy the sunset, eat tacos and donuts, and mingle. Come for the tacos and the free swag. Leave with new Ruby friends. Sign up: luma.com/h5ymkrex

🌮 Tacos at Sunset with AppSignal and Evil Martians · Luma

Attending Rails World? Join us for a lovely sunset gathering with a donut tower, tacos, nerdy ice breakers, free swag and soulful conversations about…

luma.com

Distribution is everyone's kryptonite... well, except for William Imoh. As the founder of Hackmamba, a developer marketing agency that helps teams run the entire content and distribution pipeline, he knows how to get his clients 50k organic impressions a month. He shared his secrets on our pod.

Our conference is called SF Ruby Startup Conference, but don't let the name fool you. The program is built for engineers who can read and write Ruby and founders who are looking for them. In this article, we explain why this conference is specifically for engineers and why you can't miss it:

Why engineers should come to the SF Ruby Startup Conference in 2026—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog

The SF Ruby Startup Conference is an engineers' conference: meet the people building Ruby open source, scaling Rails in production, and shaping what agentic Rails looks like next.

evilmartians.com

Persona is actively hiring engineers and coming to SF Ruby. We spoke with Melanie, technical recruiter at Persona, who told us what it's like to work there. A hybrid, growing company that ships fasts but also cares about the people doing the work. If this is for you, come meet them at the conf.

An AI assistant with read-only SQL is a superhero. Until it fails privacy responsibilities and leaks sensitive data to everyone. We noted this possibility in an internal tool, moved the data boundary from prompt to Action Policy, and kept open-ended SQL: evilmartians.com/chronicles/a...

Access control for AI agents on Rails: gating SQL with Action Policy—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog

Our Rails AI assistant had read-only SQL access and could still return peer review scores. Learn how we kept open-ended analytics in an in-app AI assistant while making database access honor applicati...

evilmartians.com

Great opportunity to attend two Ruby conferences this second half of the year. Buy a ticket to SF Ruby this week and you're in the running for a free ticket to Rails World.

San Francisco Ruby Conference, Nov 10-12, 2026@sfruby.com · 4w ago

Buy your SF Ruby ticket this week and participate for a free ticket to Rails World. Travel and accommodation not included. Guidelines: 1. You must buy a ticket for our conference by August 30th 2. Post that you bought a ticket and tag us The winner will be announced next Monday (Aug 31st).

Martians attend conferences and community events around the globe, and we'd love to meet you there! See all upcoming and past events with slides on this page: https://evilmartians.com/events

Most software engineers don't get into the field wanting to stand on a stage. Evil Martians' engineers still end up there constantly, giving talks and keynotes worldwide.  Here's how we identify and prepare talks at Evil Martians by our director of people development, @amandakinney.bsky.social. 🧵

We've organized Ruby meetups in SF since 2024.  The first time, we got 160 signups and about 70 people showed up. Two years later, these meetups are a big success with hundreds of signups consistently.  This is a six-step guide on how to host your local tech meetup and succeed.🧵