Evil Martians
@evilmartians
Design and engineering consultancy for developer tools, AI, and cybersecurity startups. Lago, Tines, Teleport, Wallarm, and Whop grow with Evil Martians.
Only 4 tickets left in the early bird sale! Share this with your Ruby friends and invite them to come. Let's sell out! https://luma.com/sfrubyconf2026
A huge THANK YOU to everyone who's already bought tickets to the SF Ruby Conference. 🫶 Every notification from Luma puts a smile on our faces. See you in a few months!
Speaking at the SF Ruby Startup Conference: Rosa Gutiérrez (@rosa.codes)! You may know her from her work at 37signals or as the creator of Solid Queue. She loves puzzles, theoretical CS, and her pup: Mochi. Get early bird tickets for the conf and see her on stage: luma.com/sfrubyconf2026
We're looking for Ruby/Rails startup success stories. We want you to speak at the SF Ruby Startup Conference if you've: - Achieved outstanding results with a small team - Built tooling to help others reach the same results - Used AI for scaling Submit a talk proposal before July 27. Link below.
An agent can spin up a web app in an afternoon. But which of those 469 component files actually matter, and which are dead ends abandoned three prompts ago? That's why we built Storybook Workbench: a set of agent skills that audit your AI-generated UI and lay it out in Storybook.
Speak at the conference on Nov 10-12. We're looking for Ruby startup success stories from those who've: - Achieved outstanding results with a small team - Built tooling to help others reach the same results - Used AI for scaling Submit a talk proposal before July 27 below.
The 2026 SF Ruby Startup Conference is now a reality. We have confirmed: - 40+ attendees, coming from our community-only early bird sale - 10 speakers, including Garry Tan, CEO and president at Y Combinator - 2 sponsors You can get early bird tickets on July 15th for only $350.
Important note: KOJI is not one-shotting this. We went through an extensive preparation process that resulted in different versions of our mascot in 3D that they now feed into the AI pipeline. Now, each illustration is $100 and has a 24-hour turnaround time.
So they work to build an AI pipeline with a human-in-the-loop that solves this for them. They found KOJI, a design agency that pairs AI generation with a human illustrator who fixes what the model gets wrong. We write the brief and their team of human illustrators handle everything else.
When image gen got good in 2025, we went all in. Midjourney, Recraft, Nanobanana, and a custom GPT app our design team spent weeks building. Each one got us close enough to feel like it was working, but it never was.
AI vs. humans for design? We figured this out the hard way after burning money and our team’s time on blog illustrations. Here's what we learned. 🧵
All the prep for the 2026 SF Ruby Startup Conference got us feeling nostalgic. We miss our Ruby friends and can't wait to see everyone again this November.
You don't need an MCP. Bloomberry analyzed 1,412 MCP servers. Roughly half of those companies have no public API at all. You can't build an MCP if it has nothing to stand on. This framework by @valyay.bsky.social invites you to answer 8 questions before deciding if an MCP is the right choice:
We work on a dozen Ruby projects every year and use many gems. @palkan.bsky.social wrote about what he'd include in a gemfile of dreams. This list includes some of our tools, but it's not limited to them. Here's what made the cut:
Last year, we decided to bet on the community and host our first conference in SF. We put it together in six months, and the result was even better than we could've imagined. This year, we're doing it again and are beyond excited. Get early access to tickets in the link below.
CodeRabbit went viral in Japan before anywhere else. That's how its CEO Harjot Gill got the confidence to build a company around it. On a Dev Propulsion Labs episode, he told us how this happened and how @coderabbitai.bsky.social raised a $60M Series B in under three years. 🧵
Don't forget to mark these dates on your calendar for the second edition of SF Ruby Conference: Nov 10–12! Our first confirmed keynote speaker is Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator and longtime Rails builder. Get notified when tickets go live in the link below. 🧵
And solved the file problem with a stub file. We plant a tiny script in app/assets/builds/ that redirects the browser from Propshaft's world to Vite's dev server. Propshaft thinks it served a real asset but the browser ignores it. This way, neither side compromises.
2. Struggling to find test participants Devtools tend to have niche audiences, which makes it harder to recruit candidates for UX research. Yaro recommends building strong relationships with candidates so you can reuse them in the future or using testing platforms like Maze to find participants.
1. Founders who think they know best Since many devtool founders were developers first, they're biased to believe they know what's best. This is a mistake. To overcome this, Yaro recommends to: - Consider UX research to be part of the development cycle - Involve users to define what to build next
We love it when clients celebrate our work. This time, Val Belaziorau designed a new feature for a cybersecurity devtool, the client rolled it out to all their customers, and the feedback's been great. Users love it. We're celebrating on Mars.
We started this project back in 2025, when agentic coding models weren't as powerful as they are now. This led to many discoveries and the creation of open source skills, because once an architectural decision lives in a skill, the AI applies it consistently. One of said skills was born from a bug.
In this case, @strongeron.bsky.social designed a clickable prototype on Bolt (React), and @skryukov.dev manually ported it to Inertia Rails. Then, they used Claude Code to work in the same Rails + Inertia + React codebase, killing manual porting. By the end of four weeks, we had a production MVP.
What happens when you give a designer and a senior backend engineer a clear vision and access to @bolt.new, Claude Code, and Inertia Rails? They build apps like @jointhicket.bsky.social. Thicket is an online educational platform where PhD-level experts teach live classes. 🧵
Save the date, mark your calendars, and decline the invite to the All Hands meeting! The second edition of SF Ruby Conference is happening Nov 10-12. Our first confirmed keynote speaker is @realgarrytan.bsky.social, president and CEO of Y Combinator and longtime Rails builder.
1. Help agents discover you. Claude leans on vendor comparison pages, ChatGPT loves Reddit and GitHub issues, and Gemini surfaces academic benchmarks. Build comparison pages, get on awesome-lists, answer honestly on Reddit, and write a README that leads with the problem you solve.
Waking up to these types of messages is the best way to start the week. Our backend engineer, Julia Egorova, reduced our client's subscriptions page loading time by 94%! This is what working with Evil Martians looks like.
You can set global or individual level and adjust which errors they'll track. Then, see everything in the Admin Panel as it gives you live status for every light and manual overrides: lock green for testing, lock red to kill a route before it hits threshold.
In Ruby, the Stoplight gem handles this with minimal setup, and reimagines those states as traffic-light colors instead. Each light represents a control system for a specific outbound route, and each of these routes must have a unique name.