How to Scale an App

I feel like most of the time for me when I've gotten better at scaling, it's been because of trial by fire. My co-founder Rob is technical, but he's not web app developer. The first time we had to really deal with it was in the summer of 2020. And suddenly we went from having like, I don't know, tens of people using it. It gave me time to have thousands at any given time.

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Welcome to Remote Ruby and thanks for joining us! It’s a full house this week as Jason, Chris, and Andrew are back together! They also have a great guest joining them, Nadia Odunayo, who’s the Founder, CEO, and Software Developer of The StoryGraph, a book tracking, and recommendations app. Nadia spoke at the Rails SaaS Conference and her talk was titled, “Getting to one million users as a one-woman dev team.” After listening to this episode, you’ll understand why she’s such an engaging speaker. Today, Nadia shares her journey of how she got into programming and building software apps, to being the Founder of The StoryGraph. She shares some interesting things about scaling and Elasticsearch, we’ll hear about her project Speakerline, and we’ll find out how she got into public speaking and how her approach to conference speaking is like product building. Download this episode now to learn more!

[00:04:07] Nadia tells us her background, what she does, and why she created The StoryGraph app.

[00:07:24] We hear a great story on how Nadia got into programming.

[00:11:31] Nadia explains how she first experienced Ruby at the Code First Girls program, and at the boot camp that was Ruby and Rails focused.

[00:12:19] We learn about Nadia’s journey from working at Pivotal Labs to where she is today with The StoryGraph.

[00:15:38] In Nadia’s talk she mentioned “financial independence” and Andrew wonders what kind of journey she takes when she builds these kinds of software apps.

[00:19:59] The StoryGraph is written in Ruby and Jason wants to know if Nadia is still happy with her decision to use Ruby all these years later.

[00:22:55] Nadia shares some interesting things about scaling.

[00:29:13] Find out about Nadia’s journey with Elasticsearch.

[00:36:00] Dark Mode is brought up which is the most requested feature on the app and Nadia tells us that she has been working on it. Andrew of course loves it, and he tells us about using Radix colors.

[00:38:18] We hear how Nadia got into public speaking, a story about meeting Sarah Mei, her project Speakerline, and she shares advice to people who think public speaking is not for them.

[00:47:42] Nadia tells us her approach to conference speaking is like product building, Jason tells us his talks got better when he started bringing other people in, and Andrew highly recommends Speakerline.

[00:54:00] Find out where you can follow Nadia online

Panelists:

Jason Charnes

Chris Oliver

Andrew Mason

Guest:

Nadia Odunayo

Sponsor:

Honeybadger

Links:

Jason Charnes Twitter

Chris Oliver Twitter