Where do Rails operators hang out?

Discussions
#1

Hey, guys!

Last year I started bootstrapping my own product business and the year went quite well - I released a free ebook for members of my mailing list and started working on my first paid book a few weeks ago.

I am quite excited about the book and I think it will be a great read for a lot of Rails developers who want to manage their own Rails server (if you are interested, here is the book’s landing page: http://www.relativkreativ.at/products/rails_operations_for_bootstrappers - though it’s a little outdated and will be reworked soon because I published it before I started working on the book).

However, my number one goal for this year is growing my mailing list. Even though my list gains new subscribers slowly but regularly, I have always found it hard to track down my core audience online.

A lot of questions related to Rails operations can be found on stackoverflow.com, serverfault.com and in DigitalOcean’s community but I am wondering if anyone knows other places where people hang out sharing their knowledge and asking questions about Rails operations (provisioning servers, deploying applications and generally running in production). Any clues?

Thanks a lot and all the best for the new year!

Michael

#2

If you widen your audience a little to “[Dev]Ops for Rails shops” there are plenty of places which might have interested people:

Meetup.com groups for Rails/Dev Ops
Small companies that advertise Rails development services or help wanted ads for Rails developers

Perhaps you could guest post on Rails sites/appear on podcasts about Rails talking about some aspect of Ops for Rails.

You might want to invest in an easier to say/remember domain name for us dumb Americans; DevOpsForRailsShops.com or something.

1 Like
#3

I would take a step back and think about your core audience.

I was a little confused about this at first because you say…

I think it will be a great read for a lot of Rails developers who want to manage their own Rails server

But then the book is called “Rails Operations for Bootstrappers”. All Rails developers aren’t necessarily bootstrappers, but they might still find this information very useful. I wouldn’t consider myself a bootstrapper quite yet, but I am a dev consultant and would find this information interesting. And I know other just plain Rails devs who don’t know much about operations but might like to learn.

So, to answer your question, I think you need to find places where there are Rails devs who are looking to learn operations. http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby or http://www.reddit.com/r/programming might be useful and then of course, Hacker News is also very popular.

#4

Hey, guys (sorry @steve, I missed the notification of your reply)!

Thanks a lot for your input. Obviously there is some confusion about the book’s title.

I have not been happy with it too - I just needed a title to build a landing page. The book’s working title is now “Efficient Rails DevOps” which sums it up quite nicely I think.

About two thirds of the book are feature-complete and I will register the domain and start building the real landing page soon.

Thanks for your suggestions regarding the places where Rails operators hang out. The larger part of my mailing list comes from posts on Reddit, HackerNews and bootstrappers.io. I just wanted to make sure that I’m not missing something obvious.