About this podcast
Brendan Buckingham and Ryan Frisch talk about developing with Ruby on Rails and how to leverage it to build a business.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 45 episodes
- Jeremy Smith · 60 min · Episode 45Jeremy Smith has worked as a fractional Rails developer for 13 years, and he says 2026 is the hardest year he's seen to start. We get into why companies are holding their…
- A CLI by Next Friday · 43 min · Episode 44DHH's Rails World keynote barely mentioned Rails, and the internet decided that meant Rails is dead. We don't buy it. Ryan took one line from the talk as a direct order and had…
- Andrew Atkinson · 59 min · Episode 43What 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…
- Claude Skills, Spam, and the Last 10% · 43 min · Episode 42No 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…
- Jesse Hanley of Bento · 52 min · Episode 41Jesse 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…
- Jim Remsik · 56 min · Episode 40Jim 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…
- Nate Berkopec · 57 min · Episode 39Nate 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…
- Ryan Castillo · 54 min · Episode 38Ryan 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…
- Ernesto Tagwerker · 53 min · Episode 37Ernesto 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…
- Colleen Schnettler and Joe Masilotti · 57 min · Episode 36Colleen 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…
- Rolling Your Own APM with Claude: Real Wins, Real Tradeoffs · 39 min · Episode 35Ryan 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…
- Scott Werner Returns · 1 h 1 min · Episode 34Scott 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…
- Is Data the Moat for Your Business? · 43 min · Episode 33The 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…
- Do Pull Request Reviews Still Matter in the Age of AI? · 39 min · Episode 32The 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…
- Building with an AI Orchestrator Workflow · 29 min · Episode 31In 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 Coding at Scale: Managing PR Overload, Using Claude to Stay Organized and Rethinking SaaS for an AI-First World · 42 min · Episode 30The 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…
- Scaling AI-Assisted Development · 51 min · Episode 29Today 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…
- John Nunemaker on AI Development · 58 min · Episode 28John 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…
- Kyle Keesling · 47 min · Episode 27In 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…
- Reflecting on Our First Year of the Podcast · 31 min · Episode 26In 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…
