Startups on Rails in 2024: my keynote at RailsConf

In 2023, I attended my first RailsConf. I made some new friends and got an overwhelming amount of support. After that experience, I wanted to reflect some of that awesome spirit back and be useful for the community in some way. This is when I noticed something missing within the community: stories about new startups choosing Rails today.

Yet, these are the stories we’re regularly exposed to at Evil Martians as we consult startups–the majority of which are building their products with Ruby on Rails. So, I had the idea to highlight these stories in the hopes of inspiring us all!

Irina Nazarova CEO at Evil Martians

Schedule call

With this in mind, I submitted a CFP for this year’s RailsConf and began to prepare, talking to more startups that had decided to go with Rails in the process. But what I started learning was something entirely unexpected. The 25 conversations I had with founders and CTOs began to shape into a story that I could not have possibly planned.

It started as something simple: “new startups choosing Rails in 2024”, but it grew into something much more, and it instilled me with so much desire to start building–and even a sense of urgency about it!

With the recording ready, check out the keynote I delivered on stage in Detroit, then I want to share more to that story, with some additional thoughts below.

Two months later, I still feel the butterflies in my stomach when thinking about that moment.

Impacts

First of all, it was all true, and it had real impacts. Flexcar, the third company I talked about, successfully migrated from Java microservices to a Rails monolith the night after the talk. After the conclusion of the talks on the following day, I saw Freedom, the CTO of Flexcar, on the terrace, surrounded by Rubyists listening to the story of their migration. Awesomely enough, you can even spot this exact moment on this video!

It was also very real for me and Evil Martians. I delivered versions of the talk internally a couple times and inspired the team to build Turbo Mount in order to add a standalone React/Vue/Svelte component to a Hotwire app, as well as documentation and generators for Inertial.js for Rails to get a full React/Vue/Svelte view with the look and feel of an SPA but without the need to build the API.

We’ve started collecting the best tools and practices for startups building with Rails here: Rails Startup Stack.

In San Francisco, which is quickly becoming home for me, I’m co-organizing monthly SF Ruby meetups: just to name a few, GitHub, New Relic, Productboard and Cisco have already helped spread and support the love for Ruby in the Bay area. And more amazing new projects and initiatives are still coming! I’m also incredibly excited to see so many new Ruby meetups, conferences and events happening every week across the globe (see rubyconferences.org).

Thanks!

What can I say? I’m so grateful to Andy and Ufuk for trusting me, a less-than-experienced speaker, to deliver this talk. But that trust came with something even more valuable: support. Andy spent hours on preparatory calls with me, and Ufuk gave me the best pep talk a day before.

Thank you to my team, Evil Martians, the kindest, most supportive people I know, who moved along with all my crazy ideas and helped make them happen relentlessly: Vova, Amanda, Roma, Travis, Svyat, Sasha, everyone. Thank you!

But most of all, I want to thank the Rails community. So many people taught me new things and showed me support. I felt a sense of unity with all of you while speaking, I felt useful, and definitely like I was in the right place.

And to make my experience even more useful, let me also share what helped me. I tend to get nervous on stage, and it shows. But a few people told me this: the response of your body to being nervous and to being excited is very similar, so you can shift one state into another. Tap into the excitement of the moment and let it replace all other emotions, and that’s what I’ve done. And it worked. This made me feel something that I’d never felt before. What was it? Perhaps it was the energy coming from a group of people thinking and feeling the same thing–could be!

What’s next?

There’s a lot left to be done to promote Ruby among new startup founders, but I believe we’re ready for the challenge–this is because of everything I’ve learned at Evil Martians, what I took away while preparing for this talk, and everything the community has already done to support this mission!

In my opinion, Rails is the most efficient stack for building a CRUD application in 2024. It’s a proven, tested, and pragmatic choice for companies that need to build and grow fast.

And our role is to help more people try it! So, let’s be vocal, work together, and support new people in the community.

And remember:
REBEL and BUILD—with Rails.

See you soon!