What we talked about
Chris Oliver, Rails Luminary and Founder of GoRails, Hatchbox, and Jumpstart, explores his path from open source Ubuntu contributions to leading Rails innovation. He reveals insights on building community-driven projects and mastering public speaking to inspire developers worldwide.
Show notes
Chris Oliver built GoRails by spending three months unable to record a single usable video, then forcing himself to record and delete something every day until he got better. That same pattern of confronting personal limitations head-on runs through everything he has built, from a dial-up offline package manager that ended up on a US government air-gapped server to a suite of Rails tools used by thousands of developers worldwide.
What we covered
- His first major open source project, Carricks, was a GUI tool to download Ubuntu packages offline using a flash drive at school and dial-up at home. It got 150,000 downloads, was featured in Linux Journal, and was used by a person in South Africa setting up a computer lab and by someone in the US government on an air-gapped server, connections Chris had no idea were happening when he built it.
- GoRails nearly died in its first year: after quitting consulting cold turkey in 2014 with nine months of savings, he sold two courses at $39 each in the first month. The turning point came when someone submitted GoRails to Hacker News on the same day he was interviewing at a Y Combinator startup, and he woke up to 600 consecutive MailChimp notification emails.
- Jumpstart Rails and his other starter templates came from a personal pattern: he kept rebuilding the same payment and auth logic across multiple apps, extracted it, and figured others would find it useful too. The constraint he learned the hard way is that he only officially maintains payment processors he actually uses, Braintree’s subscription swapping, for instance, requires manually calculating prorations, canceling, creating a new subscription, and applying a prorated coupon code, while Stripe handles it in one call.
- For Hatchbox, he stopped using third-party API gems for cloud providers like DigitalOcean, Hetzner, and Linode entirely, instead writing plain Ruby API clients using net/http. The reasoning: he only needs the create-server feature of each, the external gems have inconsistent interfaces, and if he doesn’t maintain them personally they become liabilities when APIs change.
- He was awarded the Rails Luminary Award at Rails World in Amsterdam, and failed to eat a single meal both days of the conference because people kept stopping him to talk. He considers the conference the highest-value Rails networking available and plans to speak at the Amsterdam edition again this year.
- Chris describes his business as self-feeding: everything he learns building Go Rails or Hatchbox becomes a screencast, every shared component gets extracted into Jumpstart, and Jumpstart goes back into all his apps, meaning he maintains a portfolio of projects with minimal redundant effort as a one-person operation.
About Chris
Chris Oliver is the creator of GoRails (a Rails screencast library), Hatchbox (zero-pain Rails deployment), and Jumpstart (a Rails starter template), and is a co-host of the Remote Ruby podcast. He has been building Rails tools and teaching developers full-time since 2014.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/excid3
- Website: https://gorails.com
Episode 22 of the PreVetted Podcast.