Rails Made My Hobby Profitable

Lightning talk I gave at Rails World 2025 about https://visualizer.coffee/

Transcript

1. Miha Rekar, mr.si Rails Made My Hobby Profitable
2. 2012 PHP developer hacker Working for a “digital ad agency” Hate coffee
3. 2013 Coworker recommended a book
4. 2013 Coworker recommended a book Discover Ruby and Rails
5. 2013 Coworker recommended a book Discover Ruby and Rails Apply for RailsConf Opportunity Scholarship
6. 2013 Coworker recommended a book Discover Ruby and Rails Apply for RailsConf Opportunity Scholarship Explore Portland
7. 2013 Coworker recommended a book Discover Ruby and Rails Apply for RailsConf Opportunity Scholarship Explore Portland Have my first specialty coffee
8. Coffee Setup Started with Aeropress and Baratza grinder
9. Coffee Setup Started with Aeropress and Baratza grinder Upgradeitis Espresso machine
10. Coffee Setup Started with Aeropress and Baratza grinder Upgradeitis Espresso machine EK43
11. Coffee Setup Started with Aeropress and Baratza grinder Upgradeitis Espresso machine EK43 Decent
12. Scratching my own itch First commit a couple of hours after getting the machine No persistence, just a Ruby parser on Heroku and Chart.js People loved it but wanted to share GitHub sponsorship
13. January 2021 v2 Over 100 registered users and over 4,000 uploaded shots Hotwire Tailwind
14. January 2022 Freemium SaaS Over 1,200 users and over 200,000 uploaded shots GitHub sponsors not a great fit Stripe subscriptions 5€/month or 50€/year Migrated to Fly Docker
15. December 2023 v4 A ton of updates all the time This was a big one Comissioned a logo on Fiverr All in on Hotwire Pagy Out, Turbo In radan.dev
16. Turbo Broadcasts No custom JS It Just Works™ "
17. Rails World 2023 —> March 2024 Solid Queue Using Sidekiq Unless you’re paying for pro, it’s quite unsafe Redis on Fly # Impressed by Rosa’s work but needed scheduling Minutes after merging Visualizer was running it
18. Minimal work, maximal effect Rails 8 Live in production with beta 1 Devise to Rails Auth (another post on radan.dev) Solid Cable Solid Cache Redis $ Thruster Trigram indexes
19. October 2024 Kamal 2 The Fly experience How hard could it be? ~35 GB Postgres DB 6 min downtime Massive speedup on Hetzner ARM Full Stack DevOps
20. Can’t have a talk in 2025 without mentioning AI, right? AI Nokogiri Claude API Couple of lines of Ruby Populate all the coffee info
21. January 2025 Push Notifications PWAs were all the rage again Using ServiceWorker Inspired by Campfire source code (not the new Action Native Push)
22. [This Slide Intentionally Left Blank] Rails 8.1
23. Stats
24. Thank you Rails!