Authors: Gleb Stroganov, Product Designer, Varya Nekhina, Account Manager, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: Case Study, Developer Products, Product development, Developer marketing, Google Analytics A designer and an engineer shipped a production MVP in four weeks on Rails + Inertia. In this post, we share our agentic coding stack, the skills we built, and why it clicked. We shipped…
Evil Martians
https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/ · 20 posts · history since 2026 · active
9 Jun
26 May
Authors: Andrey Sitnik, Author of PostCSS and Autoprefixer, Principal Frontend Engineer, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: AI, DX, Open Source, Agent Experience, LLMs Move LLM safeguards out of AGENTS.md: how agent hooks plus nano-staged run linters on changed files only, cut tokens, and tighten the agent's feedback loop Small life hack: using agent hooks and pre-commit managers like nano-staged…
19 May
Authors: Ivan Chepurin, Frontend Engineer, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: AI, Developer Community AI-assisted code generation is not free. It comes with a hidden cost: burnout. Are we dangerously ignorant to this problem? And how can we cope with it? In this post, we discuss this question. We’re more productive than ever. AI allows us to generate code at…
18 May
Authors: Nina Torgunakova, Frontend Engineer, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: Developer Products, Next.js, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript Arabic, Hebrew, and other right-to-left script users often can't type properly in apps that never considered them. The fix is usually two HTML attributes. Here's exactly what to add, and when. You shipped, the app works, users sign up. Then a bug: "The…
6 May
Authors: Pavel Grinchenko, Frontend Engineer, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: Performance, Open Source, JavaScript, TypeScript, Astro.js, React Most marketing sites ship a SPA framework just to toggle a sidebar. Here's how we migrated an Astro site from React and Ark UI to native Web Components: 100 KB less JavaScript, no functionality lost, and a tiny library called nanotags that…
5 May
Authors: Gleb Stroganov, Product Designer, Varya Nekhina, Account Manager, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: Case Study, Developer Products, Product development, Developer marketing, Google Analytics A story of validating product demand on a $2K budget with 128 cold-traffic signups, an A/B winner at 95% confidence, and a sequenced playbook founders can run themselves. Building a product is one thing; knowing…
21 Apr
Authors: Irina Nazarova, CEO, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: AI, Developer Community The agent-led growth playbook: how to make AI agents discover, use, and pay for your developer tool, and defend against the ones you didn't invite. LLM discoverability, agent-first onboarding, agent payments, AX security. In early 2025, Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify, coined the term "agent experience" or…
15 Apr
Authors: Rita Klubochkina, Sr. Frontend Engineer, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: AI, DX, Agent Experience, LLMs, Jamstack Most AI SEO advice is unproven. We tested what ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity actually read on our own site. Six LLM visibility techniques that worked, eight that didn't, and the metrics to tell the difference. We recently signed a new client, and…
14 Apr
Authors: Svyatoslav Kryukov, Senior backend engineer, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: Rails, DX, Open Source, Vite, JavaScript, React Introducing rails_vite—a new Vite integration for Rails that works with Propshaft, not against it. Drop it into an existing jsbundling app for instant CSS HMR, or use the full gem for manifest-based asset resolution. Vite is the build tool every frontend…
10 Apr
Authors: Vladimir Dementyev, Principal Backend Engineer, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: Rails, Performance, Open Source, Performance & scale, Platform engineering, Ruby, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, Prometheus We unveil the gemfile toolbox of the Martian Rails engineer; a universe of Evil Martian gems that encapsulate our philosophy and soul. Evil Martians has worked on dozens of Ruby on Rails projects every year.…
8 Apr
Authors: Camila Mirabal, Tech writer, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: Case Study, DX, Infrastructure, Ruby on Rails 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 understanding of the application. Wallarm (YC S16) is a series C cybersecurity…
6 Apr
Authors: Vladimir Dementyev, Principal Backend Engineer, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: Performance, Rails, Open Source, Performance & scale 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. Behind every release of TestProf is a story about battling a real-world Rails application's test suite slowness.…
1 Apr
Authors: Irina Nazarova, CEO, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topic: Developer Community 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 that got companies funded, and the exact person to email based on what you're building. In other places, founder…
30 Mar
Authors: Yuri Mikhin, Frontend Engineer, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: DX, TypeScript, Node.js NestJS is code-first by default meaning decorators describe your API, and the spec is generated from code. But decorators don't enforce anything at compile time. This post shows how to flip the flow to generate controller method types from an OpenAPI spec and let TypeScript catch…
24 Mar
Authors: Albert Pazderin, Backend Engineer, Vladimir Dementyev, Principal Backend Engineer, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: Open Source, Rails, Local-first, DX, WebAssembly, Ruby, JavaScript The final report for Ruby Association Grant on TutorialKit.rb—a toolkit for building interactive Ruby and Rails tutorials that run entirely in the browser using WebAssembly and WebContainers. Featuring a full-featured installer, agent-friendly development workflow, deployment pipelines,…
23 Mar
Author: Irina Nazarova, CEO Topics: Developer Community, Devtools startup advisory How do you measure product-market fit for a developer tool? A PMF scoring model from Evil Martians—a product development consultancy for developer tools startups—built on data from 37 devtools companies across AI, infrastructure, and cybersecurity. Five metrics, real benchmarks, and a dual score that tells you whether to invest in…
17 Mar
Authors: Irina Nazarova, CEO, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: Open Source, Real-time, DX, WebSocket, JavaScript Nothing could make me switch from Keynote to web-based slides. Then, I did! And as a WebSocket geek, I realized it opens up new opportunities! Here's my contribution to making your web presentations beautifully interactive. Nothing could make me switch from Keynote. I tried.…
11 Mar
Authors: Victoria Melnikova, Head of New Business, Host of Dev Propulsion Labs, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: Case Study, Developer Community Evil Martians is a developer tools consultancy. Founded in 2006, we work with about 40 early-stage startups a year, mostly seed to Series B. We helped bolt.new scale from zero to $40M+ ARR in 5 months. Teleport and…
10 Mar
Authors: Yuri Mikhin, Frontend Engineer, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: DX, TypeScript, Node.js Wire your OpenAPI contract into a Node.js Fastify backend with auto-generated routes, typed handlers, and request validation—no manual route definitions, no type drift, no integration surprises. Backend APIs usually start the same way: you write route handlers, add request validation, wire up auth. Afterward (if you're…
3 Mar
Authors: Andrey Novikov, Backend Engineer, and Travis Turner, Tech Editor Topics: Rails, Ruby A deep dive extending Flipper in Rails: friendly actor IDs, team-wide flags, percentage rollouts, analytics events, and admin auditing. Our client StackBlitz already had an in-house solution for feature flags in the admin panel. But as the product and team grew (alongside the launch and success of…