The blog of Nate Berkopec, Ruby on Rails programmer.
In May 2026, we are now five months post-Opus-4.5 and the great “Christmas Break Revolution” that saw us all hunkered down in front of our laptops over the new year. I’m now about nine to twelve months into not writing code by hand anymore. I more or less spend 100% of my time that I used to spend typing in IDEs instead talking to LLMs in Pi . 1 1 Seriously, have you tried Pi yet? You’re a hacker,…
A recent episode of the Rails Business Podcast was about “striving for ideal code”. The hosts are both typical “Rails Indie” owner/operators: a small team building a small SaaS. They were discussing a new podcast which is out from 37signals called “Recordables” . The discussion was envy for how good and clean 37signals’ code was. This is a fair assessment. They’ve been open-sourcing a lot of real…
In 2019, I had a few mindset shifts around recurring, daily or near-daily work. In short: Frequency first. Duration next. Then, quality. Make progress every day. Any progress counts, duration + quality should go unmeasured. Old goal: Run a marathon in 2019. New goal: Run every day. Old goal: Write 1000 words every day. New goal: Write every day. Yikes. In the past, I was very focused on…
Another year has come and gone. 2019 was a pretty wild year for me, with a number of big life events and transformations like I haven’t had in a long time. It was also a year in which I confronted my inner life more earnestly, which is something I had only started to do in 2018. Here’s a review of my 2019. My Business (Almost) Doubled Presenting at RubyKaigi So, I’ll start with the big bang, the…
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the importance of how ideas are packaged, and the effect this has on persuading the intended audience of the idea. Mostly this was due to the Dolly Parton’s America podcast telling the story about how Dolly Parton’s involvement in the 9 to 5 movie and soundtrack supported the feminist movement of the 80’s, while Dolly Parton is a country singer that does not…
There are many different responsibilities for the maintenance of an open source project, and while some of them get called “maintainership”, I’m not sure they should be. Let’s zoom out for a moment. What labor must be performed, by someone, anyone - in any successful open source project? Writing code - fixing bugs, writing new features, refactoring old code. Writing documentation - explaining why…
That’s me on Shark Tank. It’s episode 12 or 13 of season 1. When I was 19 years old, I appeared on the American reality television show Shark Tank . The premise is simple: entrepreneurs pitch a hard-boiled set of investors to give them money for a piece of their business. It’s based on a Japanese television show called Dragon’s Den . I appeared on Shark Tank in 2009. I wasn’t shy about it - it’s…
In June of 2016, I received an email: The original email Dear sir: I’m from Syria , expected to graduate this semester (Computer Science) , and as you sir my role model in Ruby also Rails , I need some advice about open source projects in Ruby to learn from. Thanks in advance and sorry if I waste your time Actually, he wasn’t just in Syria. He was at the University of Aleppo. His name was…
Did I mention how awesome it is to live 30 minutes from a ski lift? In March of 2016, I launched a course called The Complete Guide to Rails Performance . Since then, I have distributed just over 1800 copies, for a gross revenue of $220,033.50 (about $1000/week). Although I launched the course in March, I had worked on it for about 4 months. Releasing the course has been a lifechanging event for…