Gemfile of dreams: the libraries we use to build Rails apps—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog We unveil the gemfile toolbox of the Martian Rails engineer; a universe of Evil Martian gems that encapsulate our philosophy and soul.

Vova imagined what it’d be like to have all his favorite gems were somehow merged into a single Gemfile: the ideal Martian Gemfile. This lead to this blog post: evilmartians.com/chronicles/g...

If you want to achieve product–market fit and keep growing, you also need to think about what he calls “software product–fit.”

This essentially means designing tools that are maintainable and scalable. He also shared best practices on how to do it with AI.

Link below for the list of gems he uses.

“Your product can’t outgrow your codebase,” shares @palkan.bsky.social in the closing keynote at Tropical on Rails.

He used the analogy of taking a product from 0 to 2 (idea to scaling) without separating the code from the business.
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She shared how she vibe coded an internal tool and built agents to maintain the app. Irina now tracks every change through a dashboard and Slack notifications.

Using Claude Code to build apps is fun until real people start using them, making feature requests, and reporting bugs.

Suddenly, you and Claude aren’t enough to keep up.

From Mars to Brazil, @inazarova.bsky.social took over the Tropical on Rails stage for 5 minutes to address this. 🧵

4. All engineers need to learn how to teach and treat LLMs as junior engineers.

5. Those who know how to do real engineering will be safe.

This is an invitation to use AI: explore, test, push limits, and even “bully” the LLM into doing a better job.

Day 2 of @tropicalonrails.bsky.social.

“AI isn’t going to replace us,” says Rails legend Fabio Akita,

He took us along his journey of catching up with AI coding. His learnings:

1. AI is a reflection of who we are.

2. If you couldn’t do something without AI, you can’t do it with AI.

3. Don’t outsource your judgment to an LLM.

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Marco took on this idea and built HERB (HTML + ERB) as a way to give a shared grammar, syntax, and parser to Ruby View Layer and be able to identify what’s valid and not.

Herb is now also a parser, a language server, a linter, a formatter, and an engine.

Explore all Herb tooling: herb-tools.dev

@marcoroth.dev opened Tropical on Rails this morning by asking one question: what is a programming language?

We could say before it was a syntax/shared grammar, a parser, and a compiler/interpreter. Now, it’s more of a full tool chain that’s built to truly integrate with other tooling.
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Migrating an event pipeline from NATS to Kafka with zero downtime—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog Evil Martians migrated Wallarm's core event pipeline from NATS to Kafka in two months with zero downtime. Learn how we also handle event deduplication and reconstruct business flows for better underst...

@wallarm.bsky.social protects 20,000+ apps from malicious traffic in real time. This growth caused its event pipeline to reach 30k RPS before Black Friday.

The Wallarm team reached out, and in two months, we migrated its event pipeline from NATS to Kafka with zero outages.

Read the full story:

TestProf Digest 2026.4: surprising finds from 30k specs—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog Learn what's new in the world of slow tests and how TestProf continues to help Rails teams to keep CI build times under control.

Last summer we cut Whop's test suite in half (~11k RSpec examples at the time). A year later it grew to 30k specs and CI jumped back to 4m30s. So we dug in again.

We found four hidden performance killers and used those findings to ship TestProf v1.6.0. Full story by
@palkan.bsky.social:

I started a new open-source project: Nano Stores SQL, lets you use SQLite via WASM in the browser (or React Native) together with the other smart Nano Stores.

So the user’s UI doesn’t have to wait for server data and feels instant.

github.com/nanostores/sql

TestProf Digest 2026.4: surprising finds from 30k specs—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog Learn what's new in the world of slow tests and how TestProf continues to help Rails teams to keep CI build times under control.

Last summer we cut Whop's test suite in half (~11k RSpec examples at the time). A year later it grew to 30k specs and CI jumped back to 4m30s. So we dug in again.

We found four hidden performance killers and used those findings to ship TestProf v1.6.0. Full story by
@palkan.bsky.social:

Evil Martians Shop The official website and shop of Evil Martians. Find the latest content, buy merch, and support your favorite creator.

Evil Martians merch store:

You can now look like a Martian!

We made our merch store public and it has amazing designs by Anton Lovchikov.

Grab what you like. We ship internationally.

Link below.

Sponsor @wooorm on GitHub Sponsors Support wooorm’s open source work

Our frontend engineer @iadramelk.online got us all into his work, and we haven't looked back.

If Markdown is part of your stack, consider donating to wooorm too: github.com/sponsors/woo...

We just donated to @wooorm.com as part of our OSS donation program! He's an engineer based in the Netherlands and the maintainer of 550+ projects.

If your project uses Markdown, it probably already runs on one of his tools. His most well-known one is mdx for writing Markdown with JSX components.

We're also working on making backend project donations more intentional, we'll keep you posted. And we encourage other companies to start donating too.

Unpaid OSS maintainers are also especially vulnerable to security threats. They lack the dedicated time, resources, and organizational support needed to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated threats.
We want to help change that.

See, businesses are built on top of solutions they didn't build and don't control. And deep in the back, there are tired, underfunded, and unrecognized maintainers doing a ton of work to keep our industry afloat, with no reward.

This matters a lot to us.

We see how maintainers lose motivation and stop believing in their projects. This is our small contribution to show up for the open source community and the people who are altruistically keeping the industry moving.

1. Meeting once a year to create a list of OSS and maintainers we follow, use, and find value in.

2. Donating to 15 projects a year that we believe are changing the industry, and have little to no support.

3. Making a one-time donation to each project so the maintainer can actually enjoy it.

We stopped donating to your open source project every month. Here's why.

We believe keeping OSS maintainers motivated and showing them we value their work can help prevent burnout. So we're starting a new process for frontend solutions:

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We analyzed 1,140 devtools funding rounds—here's who's writing checks and why—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog We analyzed 1,140 early-stage funding rounds in developer tools, cybersecurity, and infrastructure from January 2025 through March 2026. Here are the top VCs and investors writing checks, the metrics ...

Read the full report with all six growth patterns, the complete investor map, and the flywheel breakdown: evilmartians.com/chronicles/w...

3. Every infra layer is growing.

Agents write more code, so CI/CD Depot saw 8x build volume growth. People need to deploy that code, so @railway.com got 12K new users a day. Deployed agents need sandboxes, so Daytona did that and reached $1M ARR in 60 days. We found this flywheel in 17 firms.

2. Who the most active investors and funds for early-stage devtools are. If you're raising, this is your list:

- VCs: Ballistic Ventures, Lightspeed, Felicis, GV, Heavybit.
- Active angel investors: Guillermo Rauch, David Cramer, and Paul Graham are all in the top ten.

c. Tapping into the viral creation loop: @bolt.new launched with a single tweet and no paid marketing. 67% of users turned out to be non-developers who found them organically. Zero to $40M ARR in 5 months.

b. Making one architectural wager: Depot bet on persistent NVMe caching and closed a $10M Series A with 3 people and no sales team, entirely from Hacker News traffic.

1. Why devtools startups that raised amazing rounds grew.

We found six patterns. Here are 3 of them:

a. Using open source as a sales force: Code Rabbit ($60M series B) gave away AI code reviews on every public GitHub repo and turned 100,000 open source projects into an unpaid distribution army.

In our new blog post, @inazarova.bsky.social analyzed 1,140 early-stage funding rounds in devtools, cybersecurity, and infrastructure.

Three stories jumped out.