Hey, welcome back to another episode of the Ruby Rogues podcast. This week, on our panel we have Valentino Stole.
Hey.
Now, I'm Charles Maxwood from Top End Devs, And this week we have a special guest and that is Gustavo Vealnezuela. I hope I got close the gifts.
So.
Yeah, So Gustavo and I had a conversation a little bit ago. I think we met over LinkedIn, I want to say, and yeah, I ran across startup Startups on Rails and I was like, hey, this looks cool and I wanted to know what he was doing with it. So we had a chat about it. And I think you're probably better to tell people what it is than me,
so I'll let you take it from here. You want to just tell people kind of a little bit about your background and then what Startups on Rails is and what you're hoping to do with it.
Of course, thank you, Charles, I appreciate you. First, Like I said, thank you for allowing me to be year in your podcast. This is my first one, so I'm excited hopefully the first of many. Yeah, this is like the only type of interaction that we get amongstvelopers right low for seems to be a very lonely, lonely professional So podcast is a good way.
Unless your boss is overly involved in what you're doing, probably won't never mind.
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, Like you said, I I've been working on the start of some rails for a while. I am a movie on rails developer, so I am. I guess you can consider.
Me a new.
A movie or a how do they call it that, the new career or forget the term that they use.
But pretty much I've been uh, I haven't. I'm in the proces of trying.
To get into into into a full time employment. I've had a few a few contracts here and there, but you know, getting full time. But I've been doing un rails actually since twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen. That was the first time I learned about rails through a boot camp. The first time around, I kind of just wanted to learn so that I can build my own products. That was my original goal, and so I you know, I did the boot com and then tried a few different
things didn't really work out. I got distracted in other areas so kind of abandoned development up until.
I think it was the beginning of the pandemic. I don't know if it was before or after.
Picked it up again, tried to you know, get good at it, trying to kind of learn that the holes that I had from the first time, and that went well, and then the pandemic hit us and there was all these layoffs. So I was, oh, my goodness, I came back to development for nothing. But I started, yeah, that's crazy. So I kept with the it and then I, you know, because there weren't a lot of listings or jobs, I wanted to kind of find out what what the rublen
rails companies in the area. Even if they I figure, if they don't have a posting a job posting, I could always reach out to them and try to you know, get a connection going. And uh, I found out that there wasn't any place that I could uh see what companies were built on rebolion rails, so I can reach out to them, and pretty much only the ones that post job opening. So I decided to kind of start
building my own database on my own uh huh. And so I figured, you know, I could use that, but this could also be something that other people in the community could use. So I found the uh the the domain start off some rails dot com and I started to build that as a database, just a docommentation of companies.
Built on rubies and rails.
And so, you know, I started sharing with the community, decided to get some engagement with the community. I got some feedback and people liked the product, so I, you know, kept building it, and actually I stopped for bid and yeah.
I stopped for a while. I stopped building it. So now I'm back.
I've been building it like for the last couple of months to make it into a full on project that people could use. That's kind of my story more or less. My father, two girls, a husband, and Ruben Rael's developer.
Awesome. Yeah, being a girl dad's fun. I think Valentino has kids too, but I don't know if he has girls or not.
I've got one.
Yeah, I have three and two boys. So but yeah, so the way we could talk about girl daddy, but that's that's a whole different thing. So yeah, So first of all, I'm just kind of curious because I love the idea. Right, It's like, who's who's out there using rails? How do you start figuring out what companies actually use rails. I mean some of them are kind of I guess well known, right there's you know, base camp or Heroku or get hub. I think Airbnb was started on rails.
And then I also am aware that like companies like Twitter, you know, they started out using rails but then kind of migrated to I think it's a mixed stack. They probably have rails in there somewhere still because it's hard to get rid of a technology once you adopted. But I know that a lot of their stuff went to Skala and stuff like that, and so yeah, how do you decide who's on the list and how do you figure out who's using rails?
Yeah, so that was a challenge, challenging situation in the beginning. So my first approach was.
To kind of manually get as many as I could on my own and then reach out to the community and do some type of outsourcing or crowdsourcing and get people to kind of sub meet there either companies that they work for or their own projects or companies they know. And that worked to a certain degree, but you know,
I got a couple of hundred companies that way. So what I'm doing now is I'm trying to do some scraping and looking through different websites and listings and things that ultimately I think there's about seven hundred thousand website built on rooven rails.
I believe.
So that's gonna be a challenging task. So I'll take any any ideas or imput from the community.
Is there a way for people to submit Hey, we use rails right, yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
Usually what I do right now is I periodically, I you know, post a tweet or x and ask people to to give me some ideas. I should have built, um hm, something where people can submit on my on the website, but I haven't.
Built that yet.
Yeah, but so.
Far it's just really through Twitter.
They use rails at doc Simity, don't they, Valentino.
Yeah, we do pretty heavily.
Medicine.
Okay, Yeah, I noticed that there's a number of medical companies or startups that I use rails, at least a handful. I've seen a pretty big startups. Yes, this reminds me of.
So.
I don't know if you know, but Andy Kroll has recently like published using rails dot com. Yes, I do like kind of how you how the layout of your site works?
Though? Uh, where are you like.
Pulling information from that data sources as well, or uh.
I'm pulling in information from a lot of different sources. Yeah, and I do know.
I mean he's one of the tan that just recently popped up.
Right, I know there's so many now Yeah, yeah, I guess where like where does this like? Uh, I guess I'm trying. Like the design this is awesome. I wish I had seen this, to be honest, like so many times in my career, right, being able to filter it by different things and tooling and things like that. Ah, Like, how do you, like, how do you think about like the consolidation of these different companies and.
You know, maybe what are your plans for it? I guess, yeah, that's a good question.
So I just recently noticed that there's a number of companies, So I kind of like, I don't want to build something that's already you know, doesn't have a utility or you know a lot of people are doing the same thing.
So I think there is opportunity to build on top of these database right, to build features that could be useful for a community, like I mean, the lowest hanging tree is just categories, right, But also I want to know I don't know, even categories that are more outside of the typical categories, like I'm thinking companies that are more active hiring unior developers, you know, or companies that
are more active supporting open source. That type of categorizing I think, uh, just given the the users kind of options as to who they would want to support, right if in or or another category could be uh, you know, the substitutes for the rail substitutes or rule substitute for such and such a products. But uh, there's I think opportunity to create content on top of that content targeted towards not necessarily developers, but product product people or or
busines people. Ah, just marketing the tools and the framework in general.
That's just one.
But I you know, I have a list of ideas that I could build that I could build on top of the the the database.
Yeah.
Another thing that I one of the things that I want that I like to do is kind of get involved with the developers in a company. So one of the features that I'm working on right now is h adding the ability to for companies to list open source that they're working on, so if and if they need
help with whatever open source. So but through that if I'm a developer looking to connect with other companies, I can go to the company see there if they have some open source open source each I can you know, start participating through that and maybe through that hopefully make a connection with that.
With the company. If that makes any sense. I don't know.
There's a lot of things that I feel like could be built on top of just the pure debase.
Yeah, you know, I love seeing that on the company view. It would be really cool if you could like submit like you know, a pull request right from the page and say, hey, I'm I'm up.
I'd like to update.
The information here, like have a signing with GitHub kind of thing so you can verify that they're like part of that organization even, right. Yeah, Like it definitely like feels like that's like what you could do. Like, ah, yeah, I don't know, Like how do you That's the hard part with like all of this stuff is like, you know, it's just you, right, community, Like, you know, how how do you get like the community involved in all of these different sites that exist and guarded support?
Right? Like?
Uh, where where do you find like the most like people want to like help contribute to so far? Uh?
You mean in my personal project or just in Enner first start up on reels.
Yeah, you know where.
So I haven't really, to be honest, the last couple of few couple of months, I haven't been interacting. But that's a good question. I can ask the community as to where a direction they would like for this to go. But and then you're asking in terms of like having people ah contribute to this project or is that the question, or or just what people would like in terms of features.
I guess I mentioned in both, but I was more like where people are are currently like interested in contributing to add stuff like do you see uh, do you see people are like you know, they reach out to you about wanting to update specific things or it's a pretty low volume at this point.
Yeah, to be honest, I haven't yet. I haven't really lounged officially, so I haven't put it out out there. But that is a good question. I haven't asked, I haven't seen any I haven't had any requests. And also the idea of maybe open sourcing this project sounds interesting, right, so people can mhm, you know, contribute directly. That would be a good idea. I would have to clean my database it's a little embarrassing right now.
That's that's a story of like more than half my code. It's like, oh, there's a ton of junk in here.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that's but that's an interesting idea, and it's another another way to gain experience, right managing this open source for it would be interesting.
Yeah, I'm also curious. So you mentioned that you wanted to know what companies were kind of local to you that were using rails you know, maybe for a job search or something. But you know, and that kind of appeals to me. I'm curious also just from kind of the broader view, because a lot of people that I talked to are how do I put it there, they're kind of looking for their next position or their next
you know whatever, their next job. And yeah, it's just you know, I think something like that would really help. But also with all the layoffs and everything else, do you see the rails market shrinking or growing or do you have a feeling about that?
Yeah, I mean I just know that, but you're about eighteen months ago. I have recruiters hitting me up. You know, I wouldn't normally make it through the whole interview, but right now, you know, I'm trying to buy and things of that. It's hard. I mean, in terms of the feeling,
it doesn't feel like there's openings, you know. Yeah, yeah, so I don't know if it's a good time if the openings are there, and you just have to directly kind of get in tight to the company and see if you can get in that way, or they just flat out no openings or no opportunities. But in any case, it's always better to to try out different fighters, right and your.
Yeah, well, and it's it's also interesting because I think there are companies that use rails that could use the help, but because of the way the economy is sitting right now, it's you know, it's it's just hard for them to be able to afford or justify the additional headcount.
Right.
It's not, hey, there's not work to be done. It's just, you know, given the current state of things, we're not comfortable, you know, making the commitment to pay another salary given our you know, where we see finances going and where we see the the economy going long term. Because yeah, if you want to stay open, you kind of have to plan ahead with your cash flow, and it's hard.
Yeah, yeah, it's it's just a matter of numbers, right, it's math.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think to me that you know that the economy together with AI, which I've been using, you know, the last few months, more and more, I do think it makes developers way more.
Effective, right way more.
I know for me, it's says a feature that I could sometimes taken two days to do, I can do it in half a day, you know. And that's me being like super careful, you know, looking at everything and trying to analyze everything and not really knowing my way around. But I think that it's a fact to me that some that you know, needed two or three developers, maybe not one developer can do it, and that's just a reality.
But yeah, I think a good way for developers like that our unemployee, I think a good alternative is building your own products, right building.
I'm being this right you comment entrepreneurial?
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah, So how did you build this thing? What? Like, what's uh what's the stack? What did you go with?
So Ruby and rails? That's what I've been doing for a for a while. Fastest thing, you.
Know, are you using all the shiny new tools like the all the solid stuff.
No, I haven't. I haven't even gotten into into that.
Wow.
Yeah, yeah, I feel like there's so much, so much everything.
I feel like that's one thing that's missing that maybe some magic contributor out there will contribute. But like, just like a all the features of reels, like pick them apart, look at all the lists, like you know, editors, like you know, drop down selects, forms, like all the different
things that you can do with it. Just like that you can just see better because I feel like the guides are a great start, but like it's more granular that I want, right, Like I want okay, Like I'm working on email stuff, like what features do I have available in rails?
Right?
And I feel like there's so many just for email, right, Like it would be interesting to see a visualization of that.
Uh so you're talking about like features in action mailer and then there's also the other one that reads the emails.
Yeah, and even on a you know, a more scoped level of like okay, like I have like a you know, an active record model, Like what are all the features that I can inject into this model?
Right?
Because I'm using active record as like a base class, right, and like there's so many like DSL methods you could use that are specific to that that would be nice to just like kind of like the guides like have a good like general overview of like associations and like smaller pieces, right, but like, uh, I don't know, like what about the more specific Uh you know, I don't know.
Yeah, yeah, in different use cases.
You know, it's I think it's like, yeah, is it doubles, so you know, it's it's that is sort with frameworks like grails, right, that it's so good for you because it gives you everything. But on the other hand, it's to you know, gives you everything. So there's tones and tones and tones of features and uh, aspectude that are you know, it's hard to know everything.
But I think that almost gets sold gets sold by AI. Right.
AI is good at scrolling through everything, and then we just verify that it's indeed what we need. You know, I think that's AI and real it's it's a good parent.
Would I would say that that is kind of true. It depends on what they're training it on. Right, So like Action Mailbox was the other library I was trying to think of, right where it effectively it goes and it grabs the emails and then it essentially routes it through something that's sort of like a controller, right, and so then it does things with the emails, which I think is really slick, right, And that's that's something that I can think of a couple of use cases for.
But you know, I don't know if a lot of people are using it, and so I don't know if the code that they have fed into the AI large language models to say, hey, this is a good you know, a good example of how to do this, right, because it has to train it a bunch of times, and so if you ask it for action mailbox code, it may not be great, right, But if you're looking at some of the more common stuff like active record and a lot of the more common use cases that people
put active record to, I would imagine that that's probably a lot more commonly gonna come up and be handled well by.
You know, by.
The large language models, right, because you're gonna you're gonna
have a zillion examples because everybody's using models. But even then, like if there's some obscure feature that not a lot of people use, even if it's a powerful one and could do good things for your app, it may not opt for it because it's been trained over and over and over again on how people actually solve the problem, and so yeah, I can see where it comes in and is helpful, but I think I think, yeah, the the less well used features your AI may not be
trained well enough to pick it up and give you the option.
Yeah. No, I agree.
I think you still need to be you know, knowledgeable, but I think it's hard to keep all that overhead in mind when your coding.
Wright's.
Yeah, so that's a good way to kind of like I mean, AI that's well thinking of everything and drinking it down and then verifying, right, we've verify it well.
Yeah, And I'm not saying that you're wrong to do it. However, the AI tells you too if it works, because it does save you time and effort. Right, you don't have to go look up the API and make sure you have all the arguments in the right order, and you know whatever else, And they're they're a handful of common things in rails, like I can never remember if it's options for select from collection or options from collect for select, and I always screw it up because I always guess
it wrong. Right, And so having the AI go Oh I know what you doing. Yeah, that's that's kind of nice. But yeah, you know, and so then yeah, sometimes it'll give me a longer stimpet of code and I'll wind up tweaking it because it's like, yeah, this is close, but it's not exact. Yeah, and so yeah, So then it saves me a bunch of time. And even if there's a more elegant solution, it doesn't matter that I
don't know it, because I have something that works. I can look at it and visually parse it and I didn't have to spend two hours figuring out how to do it the other way.
Yeah, speaking of AI, it makes me think about your new startup on real site where you have like a real AI category, and it makes me like imagine, like I would love to be able to see like what companies are using so reels, like not only just like reels and AI specifically, but like, all right, is anybody actually using action mailbox in a production app? Like how are they using it? Like are they willing to disclose that? Like just an itemized list?
Right?
Like that would be super helpful, like not only for like the reels community in general, right, Like but uh, you know how how are people building stuff, right, like exposing like the use cases, because like there's so many like right, Like it seems like there are so many that like also give talks at these conferences all the time, and you'd.
Think like there it would there would.
Be you know, a way to expose that other than just like publishing a conference talk.
Yeah, you know, one thousand.
Yeah, that's exactly why I kind of high you there in the corner because I.
Haven't gotten in that direction. But you know that's a completely different thing, you know, doing a little research and yeah, but yeah, that's that's something I'm interesting too. And I'm figuring out who's using it and how they're using it, figuring out the companies but also, like you said, the details as to how they're using it. Yeah, that's something that I'll definitely work on. And I mean that's the newest thing. I should probably be working.
On it right now. That's a good apportunity for the content.
I mean you can start like uh, you know, ingesting the conference video talks and just like have ai you know, categorize.
Which company they work for and what they're working on.
Yeah.
One one other thing that comes to mind that would be interesting with this, and I know we're kind of brainstorming this, but I mean, you know, you said your pre launch and you know, these are all ideas, and maybe we could talk about what the minimum viable product
looks like. But I keep hearing from people that rails is dying, and you know, I I understand some of the arguments that people make, but I still see a lot of companies starting up on rails, and I also see a lot of companies that have adopted rails or that started on rails you know, five, ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, that are doubling and tripling down on it. And so I don't know that, and maybe maybe we just need a better definition of what people mean by dying,
but it'd be interesting to see. Okay, if you start a startup with rails, right, then you know, then it gets listed in that way we can see and then some of the other companies, right, they come in and they say we started in you know, twenty twenty or twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two, right, and so you can see how long they've been out there and you know, running things on rails, and so that way we kind of get a feel for Okay, yeah, there
were you know, a gazillion companies started up in two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, twenty ten, right, And then you get into twenty sixteen and maybe they're they're you know, half that many. Right, you get to twenty twenty and you can see, oh, there's an uptick here for whatever reason, or it'd be really fascinating just
to kind of see how that all comes out. And then people can see, oh, okay, we've got you know, we have a list of you know, one hundred startups that started in twenty twenty four, right, and more getting at it all the time. And you know, of the one hundred and twenty of them are venture funded, right, which means that they I was going to say they have a better chance of making it, but that's not
necessarily true. But you know, so many are venture funded, so many are kind of micro sas kind of tiny services, so many of them are, right, And so then you can get an idea of oh, okay, so this is where this is where the action's at, and we can see what the trend is. Right, we'd say, okay, we're getting more companies in in you know, also in industries
right where which you're already doing. Right, we're seeing more healthcare apps starting up, or we're seeing more education apps starting up, or you know, hey, given the current political climate, we're seeing a lot more political bent apps coming out, or you know whatever. So anyway, I think that'd be really really interesting just to kind of see what that trend line looks like, because it's it's kind of hard to know, but if you give people a way to self report anyway.
Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with that.
In the data aspect of feed is some that is I'm fascinated by, you know, and the idea that we can it can them way more grandl granular that how we you know, we we uh process or or play with the data, you know, in terms of like when they started, how are they doing, you know, what type of volume in terms of sales or revenue and things like that, specific industries and things of that.
To me, I find that very interesting.
And I also think that you could also influence potential entrepreneurs right that are trying to build their own products. We can kind of tailor the data and into content and put it out there to you know, see if people can make decisions based on the data.
Yep, Yeah, I think a lot of it just comes down to what questions are people going to ask of a system like this, and then what data do you need in order to answer them?
Yeah, yeah, it's a kicking, kicking and an egg problem situation, right.
Yeah. I think if the community just fully adopted you know, startups on rails or you know, something like it, and you know, everybody just kind of commonly submitted to it and kept it up to date, I think it would be very interesting, just because I think we would be
getting decent data on that. And I don't know that every company's going to be willing to tell you, hey, we're using these gems or these features of rails, but you know, the ones that are willing to share it, you can at least give us some idea what's going on.
But as for hey, we've been around this long and we're using rails, right, Or maybe we've been around this long and we've been using rails and we had a major rewrite or a significant chunk of our stuff was kind of reworked at this point, right, that might be interesting. But again, you know, even if they just put in we started in two thousand and six, we've been using rails the whole time. You know, wor company that's X so many big, or maybe you go ask LinkedIn how
big is this company? Then right then you get an idea of what we're looking at.
Yeah, that is definitely interesting. And I think what I found over time was that you need more compelling features or reasons for people to come back to the website, both the users, right and the companies. So and that's kind of why I get I get trapped. Okay, what can I do to make it compelling, to make it more appealing for people to want to participate, both companies
and users. So one of the things that I was thinking of, you know, is perhaps using the company page as a qut pot the engineering page that a lot of websites have, right, Like you go to airbnbs like engineering, you'll see blocks related to engineering and you see, like when you talked about, like more detailed things about what they've been doing. They post their open source you know, uh, stuff that is related to ah to.
The engineering community.
And I think that might be a service that could be offered to smaller companies, like you have the airbnbs that have the resources to have these type of pages. But this could be something that targets smaller companies that you know, a place where they can post a data or content related engineering to engineering.
So I don't know.
Yeah, the challenging has been part has been that, like how can we compel companies to to piece of paid and through that also get users to want to busy.
You can an innate problem.
As I said before, Yeah, I mean to your point though, like a lot of companies they want, right like exposure.
They want other developers to know what they're working on, what they're doing in the community, right like there this despite what many people may say about like the you know, hiring market for for any programming, but like real specifically
right like, uh, they still want that exposure. Like there's gonna be a point where you know, hiring is hot again, right Like it's it's goes in cycles, you know, like there are always lulls and there's always highs like and uh, you know as like any company that is like you know tight on resources, which you know, from like a developer standpoint, right like which just happens like eventually, like once you're doing a certain size, you're like gonna have
this point where Okay, you've been developing this new thing for so long and then it releases and you're like, oh crap, like everybody's using it, and we need more people to manage this thing that we've built, right Like, I feel like it's just like a thing that happens, and you want as a company to like get the exposure to the people that you know could potentially.
Be working for, you know, the company. H And I don't know.
I feel like as a developer who has looked for a job before, right Like, I've looked to see who's like, you know, doing the conferences, who's like present in the community, right Like, who's open sourcing stuff like? These are all things that I think about personally, And it's all just a matter of expose, sure for the company, right And there's honestly a lot of great companies out there that don't do that, right Uh. And is there a way where that could process could just be a little easier,
right Uh? I think it's what you're getting at, uh. And I think that's completely the case. Like making it just like a uniform way where people can like you know, publish numbers to some you know, public public place, I feel like.
Uh is what what's needed really? Uh? We were still lacking that in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
Yeah, but yeah, that's it, That's that's a direction, right. But to me, I'm the type of personality that I want everything, so yeah, I suffered with paralysis of analysis. So oh that that's a that's a good feature, and I end up wanting to build everything and then you end up building building nothing. So but I think that's a strategy for like an MVP, you know, going in that direction, allowing companies to to build their own profile and post their technical content.
Yeah, that's something that all serves the thing you think about. Yep.
So I'm curious as we're kind of digging through this. I think we've had a lot of ideas around what we could do or what you could do with startups
on rails. But I'm a little curious, like what other resources that are kind of like this would you like to see for the Ruby or rails community, because it seems like there are definitely opportunities out there for us to provide something that allows rails developers to get information on, or collaborate on, or you know whatever on other aspects of the community.
Yeah, so I think one that comes to mind right now, and it's.
Not necessarily related to.
These is more on the way of helping newcomers or new developers navigate through what I call the last mile of developing, the last mile of learning, right, that last mile where it's like, Okay, you've learned, you've been through all these book cooms or self learning. That last piece of learning.
That is going to give you the ability to be ready job ready, right, which I think that content is hard to find.
One of the things that I was part of was the Agency of Learning. A friend of mine, Dave Paola, he uh started which is just pretty much get a group of people together, a group of young developers and a few senior developers, and what we did was uh
participate in open source. We helped, you know, contributed to open source, but we did in a way that was more structure in that we we we almost did it like a job, right, So uh pick an issue, you know, submit a proposal, and the proposal is going to be not necessarily code, just like what are you It was a strategy on how you're going to solve this issue.
There's a code review that a community code review, and.
You know where they picked, you know, go ad you and ask you questions and whilst you have a pretty solid proposal, you're going to you know, submita you know, work on the issue and.
And then submit and get a review.
So I think that was very helpful in terms of getting like almost almost professional experience.
Right.
I don't know if I haven't I haven't really worked for a company, but I don't know if that's the way it would work. But it felt like, Okay, this is It feels like I can talk about something that looks like a professional experience. So that was a way that they've kind of visualized this issue or this problem the last mile. But you know, I think there's something there like helping people navigate through the last mile.
But I also know that, you know, the the the state of the industry is not necessarily favorable for a new developers. So I don't know if that's it's a good timing for that.
Mhmm.
I like the idea of kind of the last mile. Right, It's okay, you can build a rails application, but here's the rest of the stuff. If you have to be able to do or know how to be right that they don't necessarily teach you or spend a lot of time on.
Correct yeah, and a lot of these are more untangible, you know, things that you got to wrestle, you know, you got to wrestle with you know, the dynamics on on your amount of year, you know your engine year, amount of year. A lot of it is emotionally. You get some feedback and I did I work so hard on this, what do you mean? I still need to do more. And it has to do with my references, like I prefer this way. I know it works with these the way I prefer things like that that are
not very tangible. Ah, that was helpful to.
Me, right, very cool. Well, I told you guys, I have a hard stop coming up, so I'm going to push us over to picks. This has been fun to talk about. I mean, one other thing that I've been looking at putting together actually is a directory of learning resources for Ruby and rails, right, and so essentially it would list and I've I've started on the codebase and I've been I've been working on it for a while. I just haven't launched it yet, but and I've based
it on our picks. So it's called rubypicks dot com. But the idea is is yeah, so it's here, you know, you can search podcasts or podcast episodes. You can search YouTube videos, conference talks, you know, blog posts, documentation, right, and it'll you tell it kind of what you're looking for, gems, uh so ruby gems, and then it'll list out all the resources out there, and then people can rate and review them and things like that, so that the ones
that get more highly rated, you know. And we also try and attach versions, right so that you know, you can put in what version of rails or device or whatever you're using. But yeah, then then it'll come back and say, okay, these are some highly rated resources that align with what you're doing. And so then you know, maybe you get the walkthrough on how to set up
stripe or the walkthrough on how to whatever. And the other thing is is that I would like to share some of the search data on the back end that says essentially, these are the most common searches that don't have a lot of results, and that way people know, oh, I could do a video on this, right, or hey, I could write a blog post on this and just kind of spur the community into taking action and providing that kind of stuff.
So oh that sounds like a good idea. Yeah, I like that so people don't waste their time. And yeah, it happened to me too that you wasted working on material that might not be as relevant. But if you know what's number one, umber two, number three, you know that's a good idea.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, anyway, let's go ahead and do pics. Valentino, you want to start us off.
Yeah, sure, So all my picks are AI related today, probably as usual. But I've been the folks at hugging Face are just like on fire lately, and I've been experimenting there so much. I mean, they're just announcing stuff
like crazy. Yeah, I've been playing with They have transformers dot js, which basically lets you run inference using the onyx runtime of LM models in the browser using WASM, and so you can download various models from hugging Face and I perform the inference of various features like summarizing or categorizing stuff for all kinds of different pipelines that they provide.
And you can just do it all in the browser.
So if you have sensitive information you don't want like pass to servers, and you want to do some stuff in the browser, it works really well. I even got it to do a rag in the browser, just fully local in the browser doing embeddings and then searching it and running a small model to do the generation. But it works and it's just like crazy.
So I'm excited to mess around with that more.
So.
That's transformers JS. They have a GitHub board and everything, and the other one that they also released, I'm trying to get the name of it, but they have a so they have a leaderboards that they manage where they run all the large language through different arenas and rankings, and so they've open sourced the pipeline that they use for running those valuations and have open source kind of to try and garner support from the community to like
publish different open evaluation data sets and algorithms and things like that, and it's just really awesome and well done.
I think it's called light email.
And then on top of that, on the evaluation side, where if you're not familiar with the evaluations are just a matter of like testing whether or not the outputs to do a specific thing, and you can evaluate them in a lot of different criteria. But they also published a guide book which has like a huge just data bank of different ways that you can evaluate lllms and so LMS as a judge human evaluations. They have benchmarking and it's just like a great like go to guide for doing all this stuff.
Interesting, awesome.
Ask a question regarding your the first one that you pick. What kind of machine are you using to run do model? Are you running from your local machine.
Or it's local machine? I have an M one MacBook.
I have not tried it on a lesser machine, so I am curious how well it performs on maybe you know, a Chromebook or something like that.
I haven't tested it.
Yeah, and one and and then what kind of are RAM Do you have a big run for that? Because I think it's it's it's rama pretty important resource for that.
So they they do a combination blend of GPU and CPU. Okay, uh, and so it's primarily like the GPU and CPU that get the most hit out of it. Browsers do let you kind of like download almost infinite amount of content to the browsers cash, which is nice. But you know, so it's more of like the storage is not necessarily an issue because it'll store it just in the browser as like a staged aspect for the for the model itself. But yeah, that's a good question about memory.
I don't.
I haven't done any benchmarks yet on on the memory consumption.
Wow, thank you cool.
Yeah, I'm I'm diving in. Are you done? Because I can just roll into my picks otherwise.
Oh yeah, that was it.
So I usually do a board gamekick pick first, so I'll just throw one out there real quick. This is one that I actually played on my phone in my computer and not with actual physical piece. It's Star Realms. I don't know if you all have played that, but it's a card game and it's got a whole bunch of different sets that go into it, which makes it fun.
But anyway, you can pick it up. You can play against people on the internet, and yeah, it's a deck building game, so you you know, you draft cards and you play cards, and you you know, you try and get good combinations of the cards that work together. Usually it's by playing multiple cards are the same color, but
not always. So anyway, I'm gonna pick Star Realms. I didn't look it up on board game Geek, but I know that you can get physical cards, and I'm sure that they have it on here and just let me look it up. Yeah, they've got a twenty twenty fourteen which is the the original version, and then you also they have a twenty twenty one version that has extra player decks and the play mat and stuff like that, and then there are a whole bunch of expansions. There's
Gambit Colony Wars Frontiers. Anyway, the base game is rated A weighted at one point ninety two. So, you know, casual gamer, It's more complicated than you're kind of really really really simple games, but it's it's definitely learnable for
most people who just want a casual game. So I tell people that too is about where, you know, kind of the casual game with enough complexity to make it interesting, but not so much that you have to actually go back to the rule book periodically to make sure that you're doing it right. Anyway, So so yeah, so Star Realms and then yeah, so I'm gonna do kind of the shameless self promotion stuff. I'm also trying to find a website for Star Realms because I know that you
can just play it online. You can get it on Steam I think, and then there's the mobile app as well. Anyway, so I've been talking to a lot of folks. I haven't gone as deep as Valentino has with the AI stuff, but I've been I've been getting into it a bunch, and I recently had my contract end and so I have a lot more time to start really diving in
and building out what I want to build. But a lot of folks are interested learning it, and so what I'm working on right now is actually building out a handful of AI systems, mostly kind of the agentic ai sort of things that we talked to Obi about. And I'm going to be putting on a boot camp at the beginning of next year and just walking people through a lot of this stuff. You know, a lot of the approaches to setting up these agents and then you know, kind of fine tuning what they get. So keep an
eye out for that. I do have a domain that I purchased for it, but I haven't set it up yet. So I'm probably going to just start dropping ads into the shows, you know, in lieu of some of the ads that wind up getting put in that I get complaints about, So just keep an eye out for that. I think it was agentic ai boot camp dot com
or something like that. But anyway, so I'm doing that, and then and then yeah, I'm I'm kind of overhauling top end devs and you know, updating the members area and things like that, and so you know, you'll you'll have a new experience for the inside of the boot camp. The way that I'm gonna run it though, is between now and Black Friday, you'll you can get the Black
Friday deal. So I'm looking at running essentially weekly help sessions, right, so you'll you'll get the curriculum for the boot camp every week and I'm looking at three or four months. We'll have weekly calls for six months. And the price I'm looking at is thirty five hundred dollars. But if you do Black Friday, you get two thousand dollars. I also intend to do AI Summit in December or January,
and you will get a ticket to that. If you sign up for the Black Fridays, you get you get the discount, you get the AI Summit, and then you yeah, like I said, you get the calls for six months, and so yeah, that's that's the plan there. Did I say that the discount was for two thousand dollars for the Black Friday anyway, So that's that's that's what I'm working on.
Now.
I have to say that I also just did a stripe connect. I had to stripe connect to top end devs so that I can because there are other podcasts that I want to start that are not programming podcasts, and so I don't want to put them on top end devs because then it's like, oh, there's a political podcast on here. Hey that you know, Chuck's Church Stuffs is on is on here, right, and so yeah, so
I'm looking gonna spin some of that off. And so I was like, Okay, I want to do multi tenancy, but then I, you know, I want them to kind of run independently on the financial end of things, whether it's sponsorships or people buying courses or anything like that. So anyway, strike connect is pretty cool and it's not I was worried it was gonna be super complicated to set up, and it wasn't. So anyway, pretty happy with that. So I'm gonna I'm gonna pick strike Connect as well.
All right, Gustavo, what are your picks?
Thank you so for me in terms of you know, outside of development, it's just children, right, So I'm gonna pick Disney Princesses is my pig of the week.
I spent the last three days in Disneyland with a Disney Hotel.
Oh fun.
Yeah, it was good. It was good.
We took our two daughters to I guess a make cover experience where they give him the whole treatment, you know, they you know, they received them as princesses. They you know, do the whole you know, princesses, set up, change their outfits and then they take him for pictures and the whole time they're like blown away, they're exciting, they do, you know, taking in the role of princesses. So that was a great experience for us and for the kids.
So that's my pick up the week Busney Princesses.
Awesome. Yeah, it's funny because all of my wife and my girls, they all have different princesses that they identify with. And what's funny is is none of them picked the same one.
So that is yeah, that's no, that's good. That's good because I know my two daughters sometimes they they want to pick the same one and a little one.
And I was like, no, you're not, you're all of you can be all.
Of Yeah, that's funny.
Yeah.
For my wife, it's Aurora Sleeping Beauty, my oldest daughter it was Cinderella. My middle daughter was Ariel, and my youngest daughter daughter. Funny enough, you see all the little girls that want to be Elsa. She wanted to be on A. So anyway, good the one that didn't have the magic powers or whatever. But anyway, yeah, very fun.
Yeah, I feel like there's a big marketing and business lesson that could be learned through that. I think it's the have the market corner, you know, do his name?
Yeah they do? Yeah, good deal. If people want to find you online, Gustavo, where do they find you? Or if they want to hire you because you said you were looking at on the market.
Yeah, so Twitter, I'm usually that's where I interact the most. G v G be a victor one one a zero.
And uh or yeah that's pretty much eat right now.
GV one one eight zero.
Correct Gustavo Venezuela my first name for my first better initials for my name, and then one one zero give.
Me one one a zero awesome. Yeah, I just put that into the YouTube and Facebook. Yeah, I'm looking to if you're hiring Chuck at top ends dot com or you email me. All right, let's go ahead and wrap it up. Thanks for coming, Gustavo, thank you, I appreciate you.
Guys.
All right, until next time, folks max out