6,000 experienced Rails devs, gathered together.
With 10 years of history.
The Rails Performance Slack was originally an afterthought. When I launched the Complete Guide to Rails Performance in 2016, I just thought I'd throw it in as one additional thing. Everyone who bought the book got an invite. Well, 10 years later, people consistently tell me it's one of their favorite things I've ever done and it's not uncommon to hear it's even better than the book itself. You can get an invite by buying any one of my books or services.
Conversing with Rails developers from all around the world
Years, years ago I used to be an active member of the Ruby Rogues' Parley mailing list. If you're an old enough developer to remember that, you remember how great it was, and how big names like Sandi Metz would pop by every once in a while to participate. That's been my vision for the Slack since the beginning, and I think we've succeeded.
We've got a number of channels on the Slack:
- #general is our catch-all for Rails and Ruby performance.
- #help is your "ask a panel of senior/staff Rails developers anything" channel, not just perf.
- #casestudies is a never-ending stream of performance wins and stories.
- #frontend is for discussing the other part of your stack.
- #ai-dev is our most recent and probably busiest addition.
- #security is also more popular than ever.
- #links is our mini social-feed/Hacker News replacement.
Everyone in the Slack has purchased something from me, so there's a bit of a built-in quality gate. We've never had any spammers or weirdos, because we're all professionals who bought the same product or service.
And, it's just in Slack, which we all already use. So, it sits on the side of your existing Slack bar, making it easy to pop in and check every once in a while without any pressure.
A number of Rails and Ruby core team developers are active participants. Give 'em a thank you if you see them!
10 years of conversation histories available for export
Over the years, Slack has done a number of things to try to kick free communities off their platform. Yet, we've persisted. Recently, I spent some tokens and built a process that makes ongoing exports from our Slack, including all history going back to the very beginning.
With a simple DM to our trusty @speedy bot, you get an archived .zip copy of all 10 years of Slack history in various formats, both human- and agent-readable.
Here are some past conversations you might be interested in:
- Watching @schneems live-trace a memory leak in 2016, all the way down to a proc retaining a singleton class.
- Hongli Lai workshopping his malloc_trim patch for Ruby memory bloat with the community in 2019.
- Noah Gibbs sharing Shopify's first YJIT benchmark numbers with us in 2021, before YJIT had shipped anywhere.
- Mastodon's Renaud Chaput reporting mastodon.social's Ruby 3.3 + YJIT deploy in 2024: ~15% faster response times.
- Auctionet's 2024 move from Heroku to bare metal: a hosting bill cut from $200k to $20k a year, and one admin page that went from 300 seconds to 150 milliseconds.
Join us today
Come on in! We'd love to have you. Buy any one of Speedshop's products or services, and you'll get an invite.
- The Complete Guide to Rails Performance. A full-stack performance book that gives you the tools to make Ruby on Rails applications faster, more scalable, and simpler to maintain.
- Sidekiq in Practice. An interactive workshop that shows you how to take Sidekiq from 1 to 1,000 jobs per second.
- The Ruby on Rails Performance Apocrypha. A light-hearted ramble around a jumble of performance-related topics.
- Join our retainer service. Companies on retainer get invites for their entire team.
Who's this?
My name is Nate Berkopec. I'm a software developer and author of the Complete Guide to Rails Performance. I've previously worked for people like Gusto, Intercom.io, and more YCombinator startups than I can count. I was on Shark Tank once.
