Irina Nazarova
I’m Irina, CEO of Evil Martians, co-founder of AnyCable, and a developer community builder. I’m inspired by the work Martians do in open source and solving the hardest tasks on customer projects. I draw on our experience, my research skills, and our shared energy and passion to build a better world for engineers, builders, and learners.
I built the PMF Compass, a product-market fit methodology for devtools and cybersecurity startups, and I publish a yearly analysis of developer tools investing. I advise startups on product and go-to-market strategy.
This research comes out of running Evil Martians: we help developer tools, AI, and infrastructure startups design, build, and ship products that engineers adopt. We bring design and product expertise in developer products.
I care about the commercial future of open source. My “Startups on Rails” keynote makes the case for building a startup on Rails today. My newest project is the LLM Discoverability Scorecard, which measures how discoverable Ruby and Rails docs are to LLMs and coding agents, and RubyGems has already adopted it. I grew SF Ruby from a local meetup into a 400-person conference in San Francisco, and I speak about how maintainers can build sustainable businesses.
I write My Developer Friends, a read on what’s working in developer tools, and for me personally: the funding data, the go-to-market experiments, and what I’m building and breaking week to week. You can also find me on X and LinkedIn.
Devtools funding, decoded
1,140 funding rounds, one map
We analyzed 1,140 early-stage funding rounds across developer tools, cybersecurity, and infrastructure, from January 2025 to March 2026: which investors are actually writing checks, the metrics that got companies funded, and the right person to email based on what you’re building. This is the kind of homework I want every devtools founder to have before they raise.
Startups on Rails
Bringing the startup story back to Ruby
My keynote makes the case that ambitious startups still ship faster on Rails, backed by real numbers and founder stories. It opened at RailsConf in Detroit and has since traveled to conferences across four continents. The talk is my running argument for why Ruby remains a serious way to build a company in the AI era.
SF Ruby
From a meetup to 400 engineers in San Francisco
I grew SF Ruby from a local gathering into a three-day conference with 400 Ruby engineers, technical talks, and startup demos. Strong communities are how a language stays alive and how the next wave of founders finds each other. Here’s why we built it and what it took to pull it off.
Choose your fighter
Building and benchmarking real-time, honestly
I still get into the weeds. We benchmarked five WebSocket servers for Node.js, including AnyCable, and caught our own load generator lying to us before it could skew the results. Publish numbers you can actually trust, or don’t publish them.
Upcoming Events
Products
- AnyCable
AnyCable
Building realtime features at scale is easy with the dedicated realtime server, AnyCable. It runs next to your main app (or, in our cloud) and handles realtime load, while ensuring the deliverability of messages and reliability of connections. Use powerful high-level abstractions to build chats, collaboration, IoT data features, gen-AI streaming, etc.
