Hey! I’m Svyat. I’ve been on Mars since 2021. Officially, I’ve been a backend engineer for twelve years. In practice, I’ve spent an unusual amount of that time solving problems where Rails runs into everything else—then packaging the solutions into gems. Writing software is genuinely my hobby. I realize how that sounds. I’ve made peace with it.
Started with API design, and built Skooma for OpenAPI validation, wrote about HTTP caching, and generally tried to make backends keep their promises. More recently, I developed a fixation on the Rails frontend story and became a core maintainer of Inertia Rails and author of Turbo Mount and Typelizer.
I also maintain a handful of smaller gems, each with the kind of niche following usually reserved for bands you’ve never heard of. I buy coffee gear I don’t need and make coffee that’s arguably worse for it.
Stackblitz | bolt.new
Problem
StackBlitz spent seven years building WebContainers, a WebAssembly OS that runs Node.js in the browser. The team came to us for backend Rails support. When they paired it with Claude 3.5 Sonnet and shipped Bolt.new in 2024, 60,000 users showed up on day one and the priorities changed: maintaining the Rails monolith and building enterprise features, e.g., SSO, team design systems, on-prem deployment.
Solution
Evil Martians has worked with StackBlitz since 2021. Six Martians scaled the Rails backend powering users, billing, and core business logic. We suggested using WorkOS for Enterprise SSO and Directory Sync, built fine-grained access controls and on-premise deployment, wired up Stripe billing, and shipped the admin panel enterprise buyers expect. We also allowed for simple database management across Bolt and Supabase and shipped project sharing functionality so teams could collaborate on the same Bolt project.
Results
- $0 to $40M ARR in five months
- 5M+ users on the platform
- 75% of the Fortune 500 captured in under a year
- $105.5M Series B at a $700M valuation (1,235% up from seed)
- 99% reduction in development costs and 98% reduction in errors for Bolt users
Leading digital coaching platform
Problem
The client noticed coaches had to manually review complete sessions to find key moments and had no access to performance metrics, actionable feedback, or session replay. They wanted to test new AI workflows fast but didn’t have enough hands to do it internally. They hired Evil Martians to help them set the base for this project.
Solution
Our team defined Personal Certified Coach (PCC) coaching metrics and built prompt-based transcript analysis. We also shipped a replay experience with highlights, built an AI chat interface for querying sessions, developed a messaging system and metrics dashboard, and validated everything through user interviews and iterations.
Results
- Went from zero to launched MVP in 12 weeks
- Shipped five major features in six sprints
- Validated the idea based on real user feedback
