RailsCasts helped me so much in getting started with Rails in the late 2000s. It opened my eyes to how one can effectively structure a web application in general, from caching to authorisation. Ryan’s explanations were concise yet accessible; it felt like a colleague showing me cool stuff.
I figured it must have been popular, but wouldn’t have guessed as high as $1M revenue. Looking forward to reading the rest of this series.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was working as a C# developer in a big, old, traditional enterprise environment. I had burned out and I was falling out of love with programming.
A friend introduced me to Ruby and I became excited again. Railscasts helped me immensely in being able to very quickly build things. This motivated me to continue and before long I was able to change jobs and start using Ruby and Rails full time.
I just want to say thank you for everything you've done for the rails community. you have been a hero of mine since i started learning rails a decade ago. i hope you are enjoying life and thriving cause you have earned it and deserve it. thank you again for all the help.
I thought it was because you weren't making enough... How wrong was I lol. I've made a lot of similar videos though and it's an enormous amount of work.
These were some of the most valuable things on the web. I actually didn't follow the video content as much as the written form which was just what I needed. When someone on my team would come and ask me how to do something, I would often just point them at the railscast for that topic and know that they were going to build it in a reasonable way. So many tricky things became so easy to do, that I could really focus on the product and not the technical means. Web development has slid backward from those days in many ways.
I started writing code professionally in the mid 90s, and by ~2010 I was very burnt out.
Rails was a breath of fresh air. Both the framework and language themselves, but also the communities. It helped me feel rejuvenated and ready for a second chapter in my career.
I can only join the chorus and sing the praises of Ryan Bates. Railscasts was a blessing, I checked his videos almost every day. Sad when he left - spoiler alert, some sort of burnout I understood at the time... Ironically I now work for a startup helping employees cope with their work environnement. Very curious to finally hear Ryan spill out the whole story... and happy to hear about him again !
I got my start in web development right around the time Ryan started RailsCasts, the early days of Rails. He inspired a generation of developers, me included, to learn the ins and outs of the framework and its ecosystem. His weekly posts were required viewing. I’d catch myself at work using his catch phrases: “Yay that works!”
I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t seen RailsCasts to check it out. Many software content creators follow in his footsteps. He set a standard for teaching through screencasts that still holds up today.
I’m looking forward to reading the rest of his series.
Echoing others, Ryan and Railscasts (and Asciicasts!) were instrumental in my own Rails and web development journey. When the subscription episodes were introduced, it was a no-brainer to pay for that for myself and for my team.
Obviously it was sad when Ryan had to stop, but it was important he focused on himself. Either way, still grateful for all the helpful content he put out to make us better developers.
In no particular order, some interesting flashbacks to that period of web development:
I learned so much from railscasts in my early software engineering journey. Your videos took me from copy-pasta extraordinaire to actually understanding how to build complex features and wire things together.
1. Apply the "do the simplest thing that could possibly work, get feedback, and iterate on that" principle to any project or idea to gauge interest and get feedback.
2. Reach out to relevant sponsors or partners for support and collaboration.
3. Create content in a consistent and dependable manner to build an audience.
4. Promote content through personal networks and relevant forums or communities.
5. Request feedback from viewers or users to improve and refine content.
Railscasts taught me so much when I was first learning web development right out of university. I used to watch Railscasts episodes religiously when they came out. I don't know if I would have grown as much as a developer without being exposed to the whole ecosystem of tools and techniques that Railscasts presented - I'd often discover libraries existed that solved problems I would never have known to seek out otherwise. Thank you for the time and effort over the years producing the episodes @rbates! Looking forward to hearing the full story in the next installments!
RailsCasts was an incredible help in my early web career, and I was soso grateful for the time and effort that went in to each episode. I've wondered about this story for years, and it's wonderful to see this story start to get told. I hope Ryan is doing okay and in a good place!
Thanks for RailsCasts Ryan! A few days back I read a thread on how ruby/rails is losing junior devs because of the complexity/can of worms docs of Rails 7. I believe it is because we are missing high quality content like RailsCasts today.
The article says it was too sustainable but we have to wait for the next part to find out why. Cliffhanger ending! Very interested in why this couldn’t be sustained.
There's also a lot of pressure to deliver weekly episodes if that was your goal. I think at some point you become unable to reflect that you're approaching burnout and should have taken a break twenty episodes ago.
A lot of people I've known in this space have run into the problem where making content became their job and it meant they weren't doing the "real work" that created fuel for creating the content. That is, the best content came from talking about the challenges and techniques learnt in their "day job" but now their day job was running a screencast/tutorial business.
This was one of the best resources at the time. I restarted my career as a programmer around that time and looking for realistic samples for known challenges.
Most of the early episodes were precisely those - how to do x?. I ended up purchasing the Pro version for the full team.
Around 2013, I somehow had a feeling it wouldnt last long. High end of the devs cant be living on meager income for a long time, unless they have no family.
Great perspective! Wasn’t familiar with the beginning history of RailsCasta as I didn’t begin working with the framework until maybe 2014/5.
Still a big fan of rails and a good reminder to check out the screencasts again.
But my goodness so much has changed in the past 5/10 years (no surprise of course).
Just last year I was converting coffeeacript files to es6 in a rails codebase now we’re converting rails to Node.
Rails is still used as an orchestration layer but a lot of the effort is migrating to micro front ends using Node. I haven’t worked much/at all on the conversion so unfortunately cannot speak in detail of how Node/Rails interact or how component federation works
After getting hooked by DHH’s “Blog in 10 minutes” (or whatever it was at the time, 2008 or so), I spent a few days in Denver with Mike and Dave (and Nicole!) for Pragmatic Studio’s Rails crash course, and that really opened my eyes to how powerful the framework could make me. But when I was done with those few days, I spent so much time feeling like I couldn’t figure things out, or like I wasn’t productive enough as a programmer. I think RailsCasts was mostly responsible for getting me past that.
It was so helpful to follow along with Ryan as he explained his decision making processes, and how he would solve specific problems. Prior to then, all I really had was self-experimentation, and a lot of great books that seemed to get out of date faster than they could be printed. Even today it’s still a huge help to have Chris Oliver and Dave Kimura sharing their expertise, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in 15 years of web development, it’s that I need whatever help I can get to stay on top of what is currently going on.
So thank you Ryan, I am looking forward to Part 2 of the series.
I owe a lot to Ryan Bates and Railscasts for transforming from a CS student to junior software engineer. It provided the details in mentorship that supplemented what I received IRL at work.
Same as most of the comments here, RailsCasts taught me a ton about Rails and saved thousands of hours. Thank you Ryan for creating a treasury of Rails knowledge.
discovered railscasts pretty early, we used to hire many fresher out college at RailsFactory and Ryans style of sharing knowledge was easy for new developers to follow.
I figured it must have been popular, but wouldn’t have guessed as high as $1M revenue. Looking forward to reading the rest of this series.